


The Future Is Now

by hoxadrine



Series: Transmissions [2]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alternate Realities, Alternate Universe - Multiverse, Blood and Gore, Blood and Violence, Drama & Romance, F/M, Gen, Indoctrination Theory, Mild Gore, Multiple Deaths, Other, Psychological Drama, Psychological Horror, Tagged as explicit for a reason
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-18
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-15 19:30:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7235608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoxadrine/pseuds/hoxadrine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she gets into the Citadel and tries to make the Crucible work, Shepard finds herself rippling backwards 4 years, into the beginning of her mission, but taking Garrus with her. And while she tries to take the opportunity to change the past and the future, she finally realizes that she never was meant to be the hero of the Reaper threat.</p><p>WARNING: This work contains more than the average amount of violence, and it's tagged as Explicit for a reason.<br/>And I suck at summaries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is some short story that I needed to get out of my head and I know that there's probably another similar work like this one, but oh well...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 09/17 - Fixed and corrected by the lovely [MosaicCreme](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MosaicCreme/pseuds/MosaicCreme) :D

Everything was like she always pictured it would be, and when she entered the beam and finally made it to the Citadel, she smirked before gathering the strength to get up.

She knew she was going to die, but she was going to make it. And she was going to end the madness, once and for all.

When The Illusive Man fell to the floor with his own bullet to the head, in that moment she really realized it; there were no threats left. Only a single thing left to do before getting the rest that she—that everyone—deserved.

Shepard crumpled next to the dying figure of Anderson, sitting next to him. His labored breaths matched her own ones, but that wasn’t enough to take away her relief.

“Commander,” he mumbled, acknowledging her. She imitated his position, resting her back for a moment on the closest platform and stretching her legs. Giving herself a little calm before the storm, before their inevitable end.

She turned to him, a sigh full of relief escaping her lips. “We did it,” she just said. He agreed with her words, giving an exhausted nod before turning to the landscape in front of them.

“It’s… quite the view,” he had to admit, releasing a little chuckle, a mix of both pain and satisfaction. Pieces of a dead Reaper were floating close to the Earth’s atmosphere, and she tried to laugh but her left side was hurting so much that she almost choked.

But she wasn’t about to leave Anderson alone just in that moment. “Best seats in the house,” she tried to joke, forcing her lungs to not breath too much and trying to hold the pain from the puncture below them.

“God… it’s been years since I just… sat down,” Anderson said.  Her gaze shifted from the dead Reaper, taking in what could be--at least--a dozen obliterated turian ships, left to float around it. Shepard winced at the sight, turning her attention back to Anderson.

Her insides started to burn and Shepard struggled for breath while trying to keep talking to Anderson, “I think you’ve earned a rest…” But he just hummed low, and it was obvious how he was forcing his eyes to stay open. She swallowed hard and pleaded, “Stay with me… we’re almost through this”

But deep inside she knew that Anderson was ready to go. Something in his eyes were telling her that he was amazed to just be there with her in the first place, like if he never had thought he would make it to the end of the war. “You did good, child… you did good.” He leaned into her side, clutching his stomach with both hands, and when he tried to cough, a little drop of blood fell from his mouth to the floor. But he was insistent, and continued, “I’m proud of you, Jane.”

“Thank you, sir.” She tore her eyes away from the blood stain and gazed at him again. She noticed how very still he was at her side. “Anderson?” she whispered, her voice thin, but she knew that he wasn’t going to move anymore.

Shepard closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, forcing herself to maintain her composure, to not embrace the pain that she was feeling just now. The dead needed to wait just a little more before she finally reunited with them.

She gathered all the force that she could muster and took three deep breaths, just what she needed to be awake, to feel alive and to still hold on. Her eyes traveled to the landscape but her mind started to drive away from the Citadel, her thoughts drifted to the Normandy and its crew;  _ her _ crew.

Were they going to be alright? Was everyone alright? She had to think they were, because if they weren’t, all her struggles were for nothing. With one hand still holding her side, the other traveled to her comm, hoping for a moment that it was still working somehow, and she held still for a second before attempting to reach her ship. Her insides started to burn again when the Garrus’ name crossed her omni tool, but the last thing she wanted was to crush the little hope he surely had for her to make it out alive.

Her eyes started watering, both from the pain and her struggle to reach Garrus. She gathered another deep breath, closing her eyes and letting the tears fall, a mix of salt and blood washing over her face.  _ I’m so sorry, Garrus. Oh, God, I hope you know how much I am. _

She pressed the button to activate the comms. “Jo—Joker?” she panted, hoping and praying to the spirits and gods of all species that he could hear her somehow, “C—can you hear me?”   


Suddenly, she heard a loud static and a male voice in the distance, his words very difficult for her to understand. After a few seconds, the comms started to fix—surely EDI was on it—and Joker came again, a worried tone in his voice, “Shepard! Normandy to Shepard, please tell me that you’re there…”

“I’m… I’m on the Citadel,” she managed to mumble, making an effort to sit straight, barely containing a painful groan. She heard a lot of steps in the background on the comm and she realized that her voice was probably reaching the entire ship by now. That wasn’t good. “You… managed to get out?”

“Shepard!” Liara’s voice entered her comm, next to a lot of her crew calling for her.  _ I can’t say goodbye to all of them again. _ “Shepard, the Crucible is not working. Nothing is happening!” Tali managed to say out loud, covering the chatting around her.

Her eyes opened, and her lungs started to hurt so much that she felt like it was tearing up her insides. She started to move anyway, because there must be something she could do in that chamber to help. A pained cry came out of her throat when she tried to get up, but that wasn’t what stopped her from crawling to the screen.

It was Garrus’ desperate tone in her comm, “Shepard, stay with us, we’re coming to get you!”

Another yelp came out of her mouth, but this one she was sure wasn’t from the pain of her body. She managed to keep crawling, stretching a hand to hold onto the screen and tried to do something to activate the Crucible.

_ It has to work. Harbinger itself was protecting the beam, this couldn’t be for nothing. _

With all the force she could muster, she held onto the screen and forced her legs to get up, “There has to be some—” she leaned onto the console, aware that the entire ship was listening to her panting. Fortunately, all that they were doing was yelling to her that she needed to hold on just a moment.

“The shuttle is on its way from Earth, Shepard. Wrex is there with Miranda and Jack,” Liara interrupted, taking the reins of the comms, informing her of their plans.   


Shepard almost yelped again. Were they giving up on the Crucible? Making a suicide attempt to get her out of there and not really leaving; was it because everything was useless? Was Hackett aware of that? Were they giving up on her?

_ No, my crew wouldn’t do that, not now, nor ever. _

She blinked hard a couple of times before focusing on the console, trying her best to understand and looking for something that could open the arms of the Citadel, at least that was something she could do. “Joker, leave… I can—I can—“

But then, the floor below her started to glow and--before she could realize it--a massive round of pain started to gather inside her head, on her brain, and she fell again. A blinding light was surrounding her, and everything felt like she was being ripped apart from the inside. Like her brain cells were exploding, destroying her implants, and the only thing she could do was scream with all the air in her lungs, clutching both sides of her head, attempting uselessly to prevent her skull from exploding as well.

The comm started to break again, but what she could hear besides her own screams of agony, were the voices of her crew calling for… Garrus?

And then, everything went silent, and all she heard was a loud beep in her ears. It was a full second that she thought that she must have been deaf—because she couldn’t even hear her own screaming—and she figured that everything must be over. Her body no longer responded to her and the pain disappeared, leaving only the blinding light behind her eyelids.

Maybe her brain finally exploded, or maybe the pain was too much that she no longer felt it, but she welcomed the sensation. The loud beep in her ears was the sound of death after all. It had to be.   


But then, all of a sudden, the sound came back, and with it the shredding pain in her insides. And a flanging voice was screaming, matching her own cries in the comm.

“Garrus! What’s happening?” Liara’s voice never sounded more desperate in her years on the Normandy. “He’s convulsing, someone get Chakwas!” Joker yelled, shutting down the loud sobbing of Tali in the distance.   


Shepard wanted to ask what was going on, but blood started to run down her nose, and the pain was finally subsiding, draining her of all the strength she had. She struggled and tried to force herself to talk, but not even air was reaching her lungs. Her back touched the floor, the muscles of her neck giving up and one of her cheeks touching the cold surface.

Between all the yelling, Joker was still attempting to talk to her, “The shuttle is almost there, Shepard, hold on!” But Shepard wasn’t giving any importance to his words when the sobs and screams of the women of the ship were getting louder and louder, “EDI, help him!” Shepard wanted to cry with them as well. Because, whatever was happening to her and Garrus, it wasn’t how she supposed it was going to end.

_ I was prepared to die here, if that meant that they survive. That he survives. _

The white light was diminishing, or it was the darkness finally embracing her and taking her away? Was it was really that easy, that peaceful to die a second time?

“Oh, Goddess… no, Goddess, he’s gone…”

Her body started to convulse violently when the air was fully drained from her lungs, but Shepard didn’t even make an effort to breathe. And she couldn’t find any strength left in her after Garrus stopped screaming on the other side.

It didn’t take long for the yelling and for all the sound to disappear, and for everything to fade into black.


	2. I have half a life to rewrite

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, I didn't noticed that I wrote much more that I was expecting for this chapter, but fortunately it's going to be useful for you to understand how this story is developing.  
> First of all, thank you so much for the comments! It surprised me and filled me with joy seeing (and reading) that you liked the prologue so much! I certainly wasn't expecting that much.
> 
> All my love to you, thank you! <3

Whispers were closing in the distance, “Commander?” they called, their voices almost soothing her, so steady, so calm, but also sounding very concerned. “Commander, are you alright?” A human woman asked. She started to wonder why the voices were calling her by her rank and not just Shepard. _Because they are the voices of the dead, right?_ But some voice inside her head, just like the one in her dreams, was telling her exactly the opposite.

_Open your eyes._

Screams, explosions and screeching noises started to wrap around her in the darkness and made her head turning very dizzy. A human child was calling for help and a geth she once knew was murmuring behind her, “Shepard-Commander”. She tried to turn her head, but instead that gazing at the now familiar forest of her nightmares, she found nothing but the empty void.

The red eye-beam of a Reaper appeared through the corner of her eye, but when she turned to it, it wasn’t there anymore. It was nothing except the whispers and now the grave tone of Harbinger reverberating through the emptiness, “Events we think to be inconsequential can affect the future unintentionally,” it said.

A man with a rasping voice replaced the sobs of the helpless human child, “Siha… open your eyes,” and she turned again, pleading to find someone, something beyond the darkness that was enclosing her. The rallying cry of a Banshee almost deafened her and her hands turned into fists, the adrenaline coursing into her. “Not important, Shepard. Must open your eyes,” a salarian whispered very close to her ear.

“If you had the power to affect monumental change,” Harbinger spoke again, its voice clouding and surpassing the others, “Would you let fear consume you, or would you overcome?”

Her teeth clenched at the words of the Reaper and her fists traveled to her ears, just to try to shut down all the noises and whispers penetrating her mind. But when she covered the sides of her head, a loud beep she was sure she heard before replaced every sound that she was hearing. A glowing and blinding light started to appear behind her closed eyes and her curiosity to just gaze at something beyond the darkness was too much for her to just ignore it.

She tried to gasp when Harbinger appeared in front of her, but no air reached her lungs. And she tried to scream, but she couldn’t find her voice. It was utterly frustrating; everyone could whisper to her, and scream and move and call for her, but she couldn’t, and that just felt like she didn’t belonged there, like she was only inside a place where she wasn’t allowed to speak, to cling for air.

She could only hear the screeching noise and stand frozen in her place while Harbinger prepared its beam, ready to shoot her. “Jane,” a flanging voice muted the noise of the beam, his vocals filled of compassion and patience, “Open your eyes.”

* * *

She had to blink a few times for her eyes to adjust to the light and the view in front of her. And the sight made her think that she was having a dream again. _What is this? I’m supposed to be dead._

Ashley Williams was in her line of vision, a hesitant hand on her shoulder, “Commander? Is everything okay?” she asked, her brown brows frowning in concern, “Do we need to return to Chakwas?”

She flinched away from her in reflex, and then Kaidan appeared next to the woman in Phoenix armor, “Are you having another vision? You seemed to drift away for a second,” he said, taking a step closer to her, his stance shifting and preparing to catch her like if she was going to fall to the floor in any second.

Shepard forced herself to not take another step away from them and not alarm them more that they seemed to be, taking a moment to gaze at her surroundings. The soft and joyful music around them, next to the shiny walls of glass and the slow movement made her realize that they were in one in the Citadel’s elevators. Her own brows imitated Ashley’s and she raised a hand to make her companions stop from approaching her, but that only made her gaze at another detail.

She was wearing her old N7 armor. That particular armor that was completely battered and cracked on Alchera.

Shepard was intending to shut her eyes and somehow try to turn away from that dream, but she could only blink and keep looking at the living form of Ashley in front of her. She looked so real, so _alive_ , and the sight made her heart clench in her chest.

“I’m fine,” she almost croaked, her voice and throat feeling like she didn’t used her voice in a long time. That seemed to make Kaidan relax his stance a little, but Ashley kept watching her with serious unease. Maybe if she continued speaking to them, they would calm down and probably explain to her why they were in an elevator. “It seems that I actually drifted away,” she tried with a joke, “Where are—“

Shepard didn’t need to end her sentence, because the elevator stopped and the VI started to inform them of the destination, “You have arrived at the Citadel Tower.” It said before opening the doors and revealing a sight she never even dreamed to see again.

She took cautious steps into the Council Chambers, careful not to miss a single detail in front of her, her heart beating like a hammer on her chest and preparing itself for the moment when everything would surely disappear. _Because this is a dream, right? It must be._ Her companions stepped into her five and seven, following her without the hesitation that Shepard was carrying, and she felt thankful for that, nodding vaguely to no one in particular—maybe just to reassure herself—before taking a deep breath and continue in her path.

And then she remembered what had happened before she faced the Council with Anderson, that day from almost 5 years ago. Her heart kept its beating, but this time her face softened when she saw the two turians standing at the end of the first stairs. Her whole body unclenched itself at the sight of the young Garrus standing next to Pallin, the latter with his arms crossed in front of his wide chest, looking at his subordinate with mandibles tight and jaw clenched in his face.

Getting to see Garrus with his plates unscarred again was something that she wasn’t prepared to see, but she marveled in it anyway. She took another step closer to the turians, without taking her eyes away from the turian in blue C-Sec armor, realizing now in his very still stance how thin his waist was, how his armor did nothing but enhance the beautiful cobalt markings on his face—those markings that she traced with loving fingers more times that she could count—and how the plates of his face shifted and changed, his stunning blue eyes brightening everything in its surroundings.

“Your investigation is over, Garrus,” Pallin declared, turning to nod at the humans now standing at the edge of the stairs, but Shepard only had eyes for the other turian in the room, and that made Pallin walk away without giving much importance.

She knew what was going to happen next. Garrus would try to stop the Executor and he would try to insist once more, before giving a frustrated sigh and turning to her. He would give her a respective nod, fix his eyes on her for a second, and then he would introduce himself, taking a few steps closer, declaring that he was the officer in charge for the C-Sec investigation into Saren.

That was a memory she recalled perfectly, because she had dreamed of it many nights when she was alone in the Alliance HQ. And she beamed at him, her face shifting into a wide grin, waiting for the moment to happen.

But instead of it, Garrus’ fists unclenched and his gaze turned to the floor, his vocals turning into a defeated note, and he murmured to Pallin’s back, “Okay.”

Her grin started to disappear slowly. Something wasn’t right. He had never been that beaten before, or not in that moment. That young Garrus was the fierce, the reckless one, the brave officer that never held back from a fight, at least not if he had something to say about it. And he wasn’t definitely the Garrus she knew when he turned and fixed his eyes on her, and his vocals—those that she learned to read and listen—went wild, trying to express a large amount of feelings at once.

His blue eyes opened wide and he stood frozen in his place, only his mandibles fluttering and moving uncontrollably in his face, and she could only imitate his stance, her feet not answering to her own demands to _just move_. She tried to say something, but suddenly her throat was dry, and some strange fear started to gather on her insides.

_Would you let fear consume you, or would you overcome?_

She was deeply thankful when he abruptly shifted his stance, swallowing hard for a moment, and took the initiative, taking a hesitant and careful step closer to her, like if he was trying his best to play along. “Commander Shepard? I’m—“ he started, his voice wavering.

But her mouth opened and she unintentionally interrupted him, “Garrus,” she said in almost a whisper, his name coming out of her lips like a prayer that she was very aware she just had done before, in every nightmare she had.

Her interruption made him hold a gasp and frozen again in his place, his eyes blinking in confusion and uncertainty. They both stood still for a while, and if she could judge by the movement of his mandibles and the tones of his vocals, he was feeling just as overwhelmed as her. It was Ashley who took a step ahead and broke the ice again, speaking close to her, “You know him, Commander?” and her voice made her flinch once more, making her realize what a show they must be doing in front of her subordinates.

 _Get a hold of yourself, dammit._ She cleared her throat, blinking a few times before giving a nervous nod behind her shoulders, trying her best to shift into her Commander stance, but not really making success. “Yeah, um… can you, er—“ she swallowed, suddenly feeling very nervous and trying to keep her feelings at bay, “Can you give me a… a moment with him?”

Ashley nodded respectfully and Garrus started to frown, but Kaidan was not really approving that, “Commander, the Council is waiting for us,” he tried to remind her, and she turned to her other shoulder, now very aware that she wasn’t alone in the Chambers.

She forced herself to move and felt very glad when this time her body actually responded to her, “Go find Anderson, then,” she said to her shoulder, her voice shifting into the Commander tone that no one dared to refuse. For her own relief, Ashley turned to Kaidan and grabbed his shoulder, making him move into the Chambers and gave her and Garrus the moment they needed.

They both stood still for a while again, and when her companions started to climb the second stairs, it was her who took the initiative this time and snatched Garrus’ arm, taking him to a more private corner of the Chambers without much hesitation, and he didn’t resisted, still giving that stunned look at her.

She reached into a dark corner where only a Keeper was standing, entrenched in its work, and she stopped in her tracks, finally turning around and facing him, inches away from him. When she let go of his arm, that action seemed to switch something in him, because he snatched hers in return, like if he was missing the contact. She opened her mouth to say something, but she found herself with no words at all when she found his eyes fixed on her, not even daring to look away from her face.

A few seconds passed before he spoke, a careful and hesitant note on his vocals, “Jane?” he just asked, and she opened her eyes wide in shock. “Jane, is that—you’re—“ he started wavering, his expression just as shocked as she was, his eyes searching for every detail on her face, like if he was trying to reassure himself, “You’re alive. _You’re here_ ,” he continued, astonished.

She didn’t realized what she was doing, but the next thing she knew was that she was pulling him closer to her, and capturing his face in her hands to kiss him in a desperate rush. And he followed her, grabbing her waist and head none too gently, returning her kiss with everything he had. When she encircled his neck, his talons got into her hair in a much practiced way, and that’s how she knew and recognized the Garrus in front of her. It was _her_ Garrus.

The curiosity got the better of her and she broke the kiss, only to rest her forehead on his, “You were—you were screaming,” she remembered, looking into his eyes and the reflection of her face in his bright blue orbs.

“You were dying,” he retorted in a panted breath, but the feeling of being that close from each other and waste their breaths to speak and not to kiss became harder, and they returned to the other task, clinging to each other frantically. His talons messed up her hair and her hands traveled to every part of his face, fringe and neck, in a rush to feel every single inch of his hide and plates at once.

Neither of them protested at the rough way they were caressing each other, and every single nerve in her body was insisting to pull him into some wall and continue with their ministrations, but her eyes suddenly opened, and her brain started to get aware of their surroundings. She pulled away from him, but not too much, just the necessary distance to stare at his face, and she pulled some locks of her hair out of her face before speaking, “Are we dreaming?” she asked, breathing heavily.

His hands never abandoned her body, and judging by the way his talons squeezed her waist for a moment seemed to give her the answer she needed, but his voice also did it, “It seems so real to me.”

“But you were screaming,” she insisted, blinking hard to contain the tears that were forming in her eyes, “The Crucible… I was trying to make the Crucible work”

“Last thing I remember was that Joker sent a shuttle to get you,” he explained, “But then you tried to speak and there was a loud noise… it was like something was trying to burn my brains out. And a light that blinded me…”

She nodded, but he was describing the same feeling she had when she touched the console, up there in the Citadel, “It felt like you couldn’t breathe, and some noise that deafened you for a moment,” she continued for him, staring at his face, and he nodded in return. Her hands abandoned his neck but returned to his cheeks, reliving the horrible sensation of hearing him dying on the other side of the comms, “I was hearing you the whole time, Garrus, I…” she closed her eyes for a moment, trying to swallow the lump in her throat, “I didn’t force myself to breathe anymore when you stopped screaming.”

His hands imitated her movement and placed on her cheeks, a thumb wiping away a single rebel tear that fell from one of her eyes, but he finally said the words she was trying to find out this whole time, “This doesn’t feel like being dead, though.”

“Then, what are we doing here, Garrus?” she totally agreed with him, but that didn’t explained anything about what was really going on with them. “How are we repeating our encounter, like if we came back in time? Your scars are gone, my—my body…” he understood what she was talking about, because he traced her face with his fingers, a particular line close to her jaw when not so long ago was adorned with a bright orange mark from the Cerberus cybernetics.

“There must be something you did on the Citadel, Jane.” he tried to enlighten both of them, “Not that I’m blaming you for that, but I just can’t think of something else…”

“Me neither,” she gazed away from him for a moment, entrenched in her own thoughts. She certainly was aware that what was happening to them it didn’t seem to be a dream, or a twisted hallucination. And that wasn’t explaining why just the two of them had that awful experience and heard that horrible noise in their heads before drifting off.

And why him, as well? She was the one that did or activated something on the Citadel; he was light years away from her when it happened. It wasn’t making any sense to her. Was this the final act from Harbinger to her before killing her? Were this young and handsome Garrus _actually real_ and not a product of her mind?

She had to make sure of that, and her question came from nowhere, but she had to make it somehow, “What did I do on our first talk after I picked you up from Menae?” she asked, fixing her eyes on him again, studying his expressions intently.

He seemed to be surprised with her question, but just for a moment, because in the next second he was smiling dearly, his eyes brightening with the memory, “You gave me a peck, just right here,” he took one of her hands in his own and pointed close to the tip of one of his mandibles, leaning to her touch, “Gave me a pep talk about the protocol in reunions.”

Both chuckled for a bit, and for a whole minute they just forgot about their surroundings, just looking at each other, giving themselves to the single little joy of getting together again, dream or not. She beamed at him again, exhaling a relieved sigh and rejoicing in the feeling of being in his arms again, just when she thought that she would never had the chance to feel like that again. It was something so beautiful that she wanted to stay like that, just looking at him, probably for the whole eternity.

But a couple of steps broke the little bubble that they created around them, and Garrus’ plates shifted into a frown before letting her go completely and look behind his shoulders at the intruder, a menacing growl escaping from his vocals. The growl stopped all in a sudden when the familiar face of Kaidan appeared on the hallway, his eyes looking at them with uncertainty.

“Commander, is everything alright?” he asked with a hesitant tone in his voice, looking at Garrus with that familiar look behind his brows; that look that expressed that he was definitely facing a stranger.

“Of course it’s alright, Ma—“ Garrus started, but he interrupted himself when Shepard gazed at him with wide eyes, her eyes glowing with warning. That seemed enough for him to understand, giving Shepard an imperceptible nod and turning to face Kaidan, clearing his throat for a moment, “Uhm… Sir”

“Play along,” she murmured on his back, in a very low tone that she was sure Garrus would hear, and lifted her chin, entering into her Commander face and pose, facing the man in front of them that didn’t seemed to dared to take a step closer. “Everything is fine, Alenko, just catching up with Officer Vakarian here about his investigation into Saren. Please, let Anderson know that I’ll be there in a minute”

It took a lot of time for Kaidan to finally accept that he wasn’t needed there, and gave Shepard an uncertain nod before turning and walking away for a second time. Garrus kept watching the human’s back until he disappeared from sight and then he returned to her, taking one of her arms again.

“Look, Jane, I don’t know what’s happening here, but maybe we can do something about it,” he started in a rush, making her look at him, “Maybe this is a dream, or a hallucination, we’ll never know, but _maybe_ we can avoid making the same mistakes again.”

“What are you talking about?” she wasn’t sure she understood the meaning of his words.

“There’s only one way to find out if this is a dream, or if we are really dead or… or something like coming back through time,” he continued, locking eyes with her, his mandibles clenched in his jaw. “We have been through this, and we already know from the first time that my leads took us to find Tali. But you need to talk to the Council, they are waiting for you.”

She nodded, this time more sure of his words, and started walking next to him to the stairs of the Chamber before stopping dead on her tracks. “Wait, where are you going while I talk to the Council?”

“I’m going directly to Chora’s Den to find Fist before Tali. Maybe I can stop that madness from happening and get her while you can end your talk with the Council,” he explained, already getting his plan in motion and starting to move, but she rushed to him, grasping his arm and holding him in place.

“No. You wait while I finish with this, you’re not going to get into Chora’s Den alone,” she warned him with a clenched jaw, “It’s too dangerous for just one guy.”

He leaned his head at her, looking at her with mock amusement. “You remember you’re talking to the turian that faced three merc bands single handedly, right?” Yes, he was definitely mocking at her, but she didn’t felt that it was the right time for that.

“And then, that turian decided it was cool to punch a rocket with his face,” she reminded him with an eyebrow raised, imitating his stance. Her annoying glare didn’t last much, and she raised a hand to his cheek one last time before separating, “Please, Garrus, don’t be reckless. Whatever you do, you just wait for me.”

He said nothing for two whole seconds, and then he gave a defeated nod at her, leaning into her touch for a bit, “Then you better hurry on your meeting.” He snatched her wrist with his talons and gave her a gentle peck on her palm before turning and heading away from her, his big feet walking with decision in his steps.

* * *

They couldn’t be more wrong about it all.

When the doors opened, the only thing she could do was to jump to the closest cover she could find, unable to watch for Garrus. The place was already a battlefield, probably even worse than what she encountered the first time. “What the fuck?” Ashley yelled, tucked in another cover and looking for her assault rifle, “They were expecting us!”

Shepard stuck her head out to get a nice headshot into a red armored krogan, but got into her cover with the same speed, “ _Garrus!_ ” she roared into the comms and loud enough for the whole place to hear her, unleashing another volley of shots and covering herself to continue, this time just to the comms, “What the fuck, big guy, you agreed with the waiting!”

“Ashley’s right, they knew all along, Shepard!” answered his flanging voice from the comms and from the other side of the bar. She opened her mouth to warn him again about slipping off and calling her subordinates’ names like he knew them all along, but gazing at the woman in the Phoenix armor, Shepard noticed that she didn’t realized his slip off. “On your ten!” he shouted, and the Commander rose again, throwing her biotics at the couple of humans enclosing her position, making them fly and giving the advantage to her turian boyfriend.

“Where’s the quarian you talked us about, Commander?” Kaidan shouted from the bar, his blue glowing fists giving away his location, “It seems like a trap to me!”

“I tried to stop her, and that’s how they got me.” Garrus confessed in a panted breath, getting into another cover closer to Shepard. She didn’t try to move too much from her cover, because despite that Garrus and her managed perfectly in the battlefield, she also was aware that this was something that Kaidan and Ashley never managed to do before. At least it wasn’t a usual bar fight, not when you’ve got something close to fifteen krogans with their shotguns shooting at you.

She cursed herself for not getting Wrex before daring to enter to the bar, but maybe that was the mistake she made after all: Waiting and slowly getting the people into her cause. Maybe Garrus was right and risking into getting Tali first was the best possible result of all the madness that it turned out to be the search for Saren. Maybe they got stuck into this kind of ‘memory’ or accidentally she did something to ripple backwards into the beginning because they needed to _do something different_.

But they weren’t gods, much less something so devious like a Reaper, they weren’t anything like that to play with the odds, and the simple thought of that made her wanting to crawl somewhere and shutting her eyes and ears from the whole scene, begging like a child for an end of it.

_If you had the power to affect monumental change…_

The memory of Harbinger’s voice made something switch in her. Maybe this was a test, and then Garrus was right after all. Maybe they needed to change something, _anything_ , and face a better ending of the whole Reaper threat. Suddenly, it started to make more sense in her head. That theory, that line of thought was the most obvious to her for making Garrus join into this madness. After all, he was the first to join her cause without hesitation, or even needing evidence of it.

He always was the first one that believed in her.

A smile crossed her face, strengthening her resolve, and she crawled out from her cover to take the next one with renewed confidence, taking another krogan in her way with her biotics. Her back stuck in a half wall, and she turned her head, finding Garrus right on her three, his gaze focused on the battlefield, clenched jaw, the perfect image of the fierce warrior and strategist she fell in love with. He covered after placing another headshot, finding her eyes fixed on him, and his mandibles fluttered in a smile. “Save the eye candy for later, Commander,” he teased her with a movement of his brow plates.

She chuckled, forcing herself to look away from him and return to the matter at hand. But her mirth didn’t lasted for more than a few seconds, because a quarian dressed in purple clothes entered on her line of sight. She was struggling with Fist’s bodyguards, who were pushing her into his office roughly, already inside of the first set of doors. “They have Tali!” she warned, reloading her pistol in a rush.

Garrus was faster than her, but also the reckless one, and before she noticed he was leaving his cover, assault rifle in hand, sending bullets everywhere and trying to run to the doors before they closed, “Go, go, go!” he yelled in a frenzy.

Shepard’s eyes widened, her heart already punching inside her chest. Ashley and Kaidan were too far away to cover him, how he couldn’t notice that? _He’s forgetting that they are not the Ashley and Kaidan he once knew_. Her fists glowered blue and she didn’t even took a breath before heading out of her cover, her scream coming from the bottom of her throat, “Garrus, _no!_ ”

And she acted too late.

The bullet from Garrus’ rifle got into the shoulder of the krogan next to him, but it wasn’t the right arm to shoot at, and in a quick reflex, the krogan snatched Garrus’ wrist—the one that was holding his weapon—and pulled him closer before clutching his shotgun in his stomach and firing.

Shepard could hear Garrus’ surprised gasp and deep gulp even from her distance. All that she could do was to watch him in pure shock how his knees gave up first, and then how a lot of cobalt blue blood started to stain the floor, a three fingered hand holding uselessly to his stomach.

Her blood boiled up and every part of her body started to glow in pale blue energy before releasing a scream that reverberated through the whole bar and charging to the krogan, her eyes already seeing red. She didn’t even waste her breath shooting at him; instead, she directed a punch into his face with all the force she could muster, breaking a few fingers in the process despite the protection and the power of her biotics. It was then when she realized that she wasn’t in that cybernetic enhanced body provided for Cerberus, but in her real one, and that body wasn’t that hard, or didn’t had a skin weave that helped her in her healing.

The krogan almost fell to the floor, but that wasn’t enough to end with her thirst for blood, continuing her assault with a head butt and more punches to his head. Her forehead started to bleed with the blow, and she activated her omni blade, making a quick movement and stabbing the krogan right into the place where he first wounded Garrus.

The whole shooting came to an end, or at least they were no bullets spreading around and close to her, but the moment that it was enough for her it was just after killing the krogan, and when a limping turian came into her line of sight.

Her pistol fell with a loud thump and it took her two long strides to get on her knees and over him, the hand that wasn’t broke looking for some medigel in another entirely different frantic state. “Hold on, honey, just hold on!” she cried to him, without even turning to the couple of steps running to her and calling her by rank.

Garrus was choking under her, but he managed to grasp her wrist, making her stop in her frenzy, “That’s… that’s okay,” he panted, his vocals doing the job of speaking for him and singing in a tone of forced reassurance, “I don’t even fe—feel it…”

She clung to his face, her own being very dirty from her red blood and tears, and blinking hard to take away the drops of red coming from her forehead away from her eyes, not even wasting a moment to use her hands and not touch him, “No, it’s not!” she cried, her throat closing with each second passing. Only a thin tone came out of her mouth when she continued, “I can’t watch you die again…”

The hands of Kaidan climbed to one of her arms, trying to take her away from Garrus, but she didn’t even looked at the man, snatching her arm away and returning to him, not even caring anymore about playing it along, or lying, or pretending to be the Commander they thought they knew. Her throat was completely closed by that moment, and some drops of her blood were now adorning Garrus’ silver plates.

“Close your eyes,” he managed to whisper, their faces inches away from each other, “It’ll… it’ll be over soon.” And he was choking again, a pool of cobalt blue blood coming out from the side of his mandibles.

She obeyed him for once and clenched her eyes shut, her trembling jaw resting on his sharp and hard one, placing a kiss on his stiff lips filled with the taste of salt. “I love you.” Was the last she could say through her closed throat, her pink lips shaking violently when a three fingered hand placed itself gently on top of her damaged one.  

She started to suffocate next to him, but when her subordinates tried once again to take her away from Garrus, she snatched away again and dropped her whole body on top of him, hugging him tightly and their foreheads meeting each other.

He stopped breathing after a while and—again—it didn’t took much long for her to follow him into the void, and for everything to fade into black once more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I need to seriously leave some triggers about A LOT OF DRAMA and A LOT OF DYING.  
> Actually I cried a lot writing this, so maybe I got what I deserved.


	3. I am gonna take the past away

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I have no words to say for how thankful I am and how good it feels that this story it's getting so accepted. I have nothing to say but thank you! Your comments meant the world to me <3
> 
> I hope you like this chapter, because writing it (and writing the chapter before this one) made me tear up an awful lot. But that's surely because I have easy tears (?) and I'm used to cry for a lot of stupid things. Hopefully that's not going to happen to you but, oh drama... *looks up for some napkins*

_Open your eyes._

Shepard obeyed the unrecognizable voice and blinked hard just right before some kind of light bulb exploded in the distance, making her eyes and mouth cringe. Trying not to pay attention to the pounding of her head, she attempted to take some steps, walking into a thick red colored smoke in front of her.

She used a naked elbow to cover part of her face and a hand to try to take away the smoke, her gaze shifting and looking whatever she could gaze, trying to find the source of the light. But—of course—when the smoke started to dissipate, there was only darkness.

And a landscape. A full view of the stars right up above her, just as if she were looking through a big window of some ship.

“Cascading waves of change.” Harbinger’s voice reverberated through the emptiness, its voice getting into her skin, freezing her bones. She thought at first that she was shuddering, but her brain recognized the sensation as only wind.

 _Where am I?_ , she tried to speak, but no voice came out from her lips. “Unimportant, Shepard-Commander,” the wind said behind her, taking the place where the red smoke had gathered before, “Open your eyes.” And she wanted to. Oh, if someone could knew how much she wanted to obey that order.

The sound of metal crushing together came from her left, and her head automatically turned to the source of it, revealing another view she could not believe that she hadn’t saw it before. Her mouth opened to gasp and she could feel her lungs expanding inside her body, but no sound of air came out of it. Instead, she decided to keep walking to her left, her feet eager and anxious to obey and get closer.

She never thought that she could see Palaven burning again, but there it was. The once green and silver view from the space was now, once more, in a blaze of orange, red and dark gray. Nukes were exploding inside its orbit, and ships were falling like asteroids into the atmosphere. But what it really took her breath away was the turian in blue and silver armor standing a few meters ahead, his back turned to her and his three fingered hands closing into fists.

She stretched a hand to Garrus while she walked to him, her fingers twitching to feel the cold metal of his armor—something that could assure her that he was here—to feel the gold paint of his Archangel insignia right next to the Hierarchy. But when her fingertips were about to touch him, she reached nothing, her hand enclosing in smoke again, like if she was trying to touch a hologram. _Or a ghost._

But her movements made the ghost of Garrus react, and she quickly took her eyes away from Palaven to get close to him, finally relieved to see something beyond the darkness. “Will be over soon, Shepard. Must open your eyes,” a salarian whispered behind her, but she forced the whispers away from her mind with a shake of her head.

The turian in front of her was with his head down, a horrible keen she could not hear but feel deep in her bones was released from his sub vocals. She placed herself in front of him, lowering her head, trying not to touch him—because she somehow knew that if she do that, he would disappear—but forcing him somehow to see her. _Garrus, look at me_ , she tried to spoke again, and her voice didn’t obey her, making her lips contort in pure frustration.

But he heard her, because in the next blink, a three fingered hand was gripping her arm tightly, making her gasp in surprise—though no sound came of her—and pushing her close to him. Her heart and head started to pound with devastating force when a set of two red glowing eyes behind a blue marked face stared at her, his gripping too strong to get away from him. “Would you let fear consume you, or would you overcome?” Garrus’ mouth said, but only Harbinger’s voice came into her ears.

And she could saw her own panicked face reflecting in those red orbs, glowing more and more each second, like the beam of the Reaper preparing to shoot at her again, but no scream came out of her lips when the turian’s talons punctured her skin, her strength slipping away.

And like if someone had punched her face, she blinked again and two sets of cobalt eyes were staring at her, inches away, with a fear she never saw in it. “Jane, I can’t—“ Garrus’ voice panted, shaking her arm with desperation, “Open your eyes, _now!_ ”

* * *

When the air reached her lungs and filled her, it was like she had stopped breathing for hours, and she had to blink hard and fast to stop her head from spinning and to also adjust to the new light. A massive head came into her line of sight, covering the bright sun that was washing over her face, another set of red eyes staring to her. But this time her throat could release a gasp before her arms started to move desperately, looking for some support and to get away from the red orbs.

Her vision started to clear and her heart stopped his frantic pound when the head of Wrex materialized in front of her, a big hand trying to stop her. “Shepard, what the hell?” he said, frowning to her and leaning to help her to get out from where she was laying on the floor.

She accepted his help and stretched an arm, suddenly feeling her strength renewed at the touch of her krogan friend. Her head moved to nod at him in thanks, but in the next second her blood boiled up in adrenaline when she could only saw the krogan in her surroundings. “Gar—“ she croaked and coughed, clearing her throat when her voice didn’t seemed to obey her, starting over, “Garrus… where’s Garrus?” she asked Wrex.

Wrex frowned again but nodded to a spot behind her shoulders, and she released her grip on him to turn her head and follow his eyes. Garrus was just a few meters ahead, sitting on the floor and leaning his back on a railing, his heavy breathing matching hers.

It only took her three long strides to get to him, getting on her knees and holding his face with her two gloved hands. “Garrus, is that you?” she said, touching his silver plates now shining with the bathed sun on it, brightening his beautiful cobalt blue markings. She watched him intently, noticing that he was missing his scarring again. “Garrus?” she asked again, her voice wavering for a moment and searching his eyes, suddenly feeling very afraid.

 _What if I’m looking at another Garrus? What if he’s not him? Oh, please God, I can’t lose him again._ Her brain started to hurt at all the questions that were gathering in her mind, her jaw clenching hard, but a three fingered hand enclosed her arm—this time with gentleness—shutting down the questions in her head, “Jane?” Garrus wondered with a thin voice, blue eyes meeting emerald ones.

She exhaled a deep breath of relief and he grunted a bit when she crushed him in a tight hug, blinking hard to take away the tears coming to her eyes. His arms enclosed her, sub vocals singing in full cheer, and his own relief coming out from his first set of vocals. “Damn, I thought…” he started, but never finished his speech, giving more importance to the woman in his arms, cradling on his chest and tugging as closest as she could.

Their foreheads meet on the way and both of them closed their eyes, slowly cradling back and forth, a long hand slipping through her hair and holding her head lovingly. They didn’t needed words to express themselves, and Shepard knew—and felt with the tone of his sub vocals—how relieved he was as well for getting to see her again. It was like nothing else in the galaxy mattered anymore, nothing and anything but the turian embracing her, his breath close to her cheek, making the skin of her neck turn into goose bumps.

And they stayed together; holding and clinging to each other for what it seemed an eternity, the bright sun helping to wash each other’s nightmares and visions of the void, making them concentrate and focus in the very real moment they were sharing. Because—again—she knew that they couldn’t be dreaming. It just didn’t seemed possible to recreate so perfectly the feeling of their brows pressing together, or his warm breath caressing her face, or his long talons messing with her hair. The only explanation for that it was that he was _real_.

A faked cough resounded behind her, making them both open their eyes in confusion. “Do I need to ask what the hell is going on, or are you going to start talking?” asked Wrex in an annoyed tone, crossing his massive arms on his red plated chest and staring at them, his look unsurprised. Garrus started to release her, his mandibles twitching in nervousness and mumbling something that not even Shepard could understand, but it sounded like an apology.

Shepard quickly got on her knees again, very aware that the krogan’s gaze on her side, but Wrex just started to chuckle, “Come on, you pyjaks, it’s not like I never heard you behind the Mako,” he started to joke, walking a few steps to help Garrus stand up, and his tone shifting quickly into one of disturbance, “But both of you just fainted on me for a minute. What happened to you?”

Shepard started to frown, a little pound gathering on the side of her head, making her realize where she hit the floor when her body ‘fainted’, like Wrex mentioned, but also making the questions reappear. _Behind the Mako? What is he talking about?._ Locking eyes with Garrus for a moment, she knew that he was making himself the same questions, but he was standing very still, like waiting for her to make the first move.

“I… I don’t know,” she answered, and she wasn’t entirely lying about it. Wrex’ gaze shifted to Garrus and he shrugged, adding a shake of his head in agreement with her words, and their krogan companion grunted for a moment, but he seemed that he believed them. Shepard sighed deeply at the uncomfortable silence and tried straightening her posture, preparing herself for what was about to come and trying to play along with what they have.

She was about to ask where they were, but again, words weren’t necessary when she recognized the bathing sun of Virmire and the railing of the facilities the three of them had run into, in another time and another memory. And her heart started to pound again when she gazed upon her surroundings, because if she recalled the memory correctly, she knew what was about to come.

“Chief!” the voice of Kaidan Alenko entered their comms, his breathing erratic, “We just spotted a geth ship inbound to your location!” and Shepard’s neck craned behind her shoulders, looking with wide eyes how the massive ship was taking the place that just a few minutes ago was taken by the Normandy.

“It’s already here and it’s bleeding geth all over the bomb site!” Ashley answered her crewmate, the sound of shooting and running over water behind her voice.

Shepard activated her comms and her words came out without thinking them, “Can you hold them off?” she asked, already moving to the elevator again and trying to do something to help her subordinate.

“There’s too many! I don’t think we can hold them!” said Ashley, with a frantic tone. Wrex nodded to her and Garrus was already taking hold of his HMWA assault rifle, checking for bullets in the process. But when she was about to return, her veins already filling with adrenaline, Ashley repeated the words that Shepard had heard a long time ago, “I’m activating the nuke.”

Her eyes opened wide but her feet stopped its movement, freezing her in her spot, and she could only yell, “No! What are you doing, Chief!?” but Shepard felt that she didn’t yelled enough at her subordinate. _Why is she sentencing herself to death again? Why I can’t do something about it?_

“Making sure this bomb goes off, no matter what.” Ashley muttered through clenched teeth, the shooting behind her comms stopping for a moment. “It’s done, Commander,” she sentenced after a minute, her voice determined, “Go get the lieutenant and get the hell out of here.”

A hand gripped her arm and when she looked behind her shoulder, Garrus was watching her intently, his eyes fixing on her and flashing in deep caution. His nostrils flared and his mandibles were tight in his cheeks. Kaidan was arguing with Ashley through the comms, but she couldn’t take her eyes away from her boyfriend, and the voices of her subordinates went away when Garrus’ sub vocals started to talk for him. He was asking for permission.

 _He wants to go to Ashley_ , she suddenly realized and gripped hard on his cowl, forcing him close to her with a growl lightly similar to his own ones—a certain kind of assimilation she learned through her years sharing a ship and a bed with him—muttering silently, “You’re not going away from my sight, Vakarian.” She said, her red brows following with a big frown and her eyes flashing with her own warning. _Do I need to remember to you what happened when you just did that the last time?_ , she intended to said with her eyes.

He held her stare for a long time, and her enraged frown shifted and gave way to a questioning one, but then he ended the staring contest with a sigh of defeat, closing his eyes for a moment. “Yeah...” He murmured, moving to not give his back to Wrex, who was gazing in the bomb site’s direction, deep in thought.

Shepard came back to the platform when she first woke up and leaned on the railing with both of her hands gripping onto it, her pistol long forgotten. Maybe if she could send Liara to get Ashley, she would have the backup she needed to get away from the bomb. Maybe they could get somewhere safe and Joker would get the girls after the explosion. But maybe that would mean that she needed to play with the odds again, and probably not even with Liara’s help could Ashley survive to the bomb. Or send Wrex to her? No, she needed him to fight Saren.

Every single possible course of action came to Shepard’s mind, trying to figure a way to both of her crewmates to survive, but she was running out of time. And options. Her head fell to her chest in defeat when a krogan and a turian hand placed themselves on each of her shoulders, one of her companions sending the best tone of comfort and understanding his vocals could give; the other giving reassurance to her. “Williams is right, Shepard.” Was the only thing Wrex said through the whole debate, and her head turned to stare at his crimson eyes, seeing a glimpse of sadness flashing on those orbs.

_Cascading waves of change…_

And she knew it now, and still, it felt devastating to her not to change—or at least to be able to—what she needed, what the others needed. But they were different in that time, and they had made a change before stepping on Virmire. Wrex just let that slip: The version of her and Garrus that the krogan knew _were together_ before their present moment.

She wondered for a moment if that kind of decision or circumstance could affect her choices through time, if admitting their truth and being together since the very beginning could somehow make a change in their lives. Deep in her head, she knew the answer: No.

Friend or lover, crewmate or life mate, she would always chose Garrus to watch her back, no matter what. She always did, and always will.  

She sighed again, returning to the matter at hand and giving her krogan crewmate a forced nod of silent agreement, one of her hands making its way to turn on the comms, “Alenko… radio Joker and tell him to meet us on the AA tower,” she murmured, not taking her eyes away from Wrex’ gaze, needing his support for a moment.

Kaidan mumbled something in surprising acceptance and she gave him and Ashley a moment to have their final words at each other before moving on. Wrex’ hand abandoned her shoulder and looked away from her while Garrus leaned a meter closer, both of his hands on her. “I’m sorry Ashley… I had to make a choice.”

“I understand, Commander. I don’t regret a thing,” answered the voice of the last soldier of the Williams bloodline. _Your granddad must be proud at you, girl_ , she thought to herself before leaning away from the railing, letting the turian help her gather her wits and collect what was left of her resolve before continuing.

When the comms went off Shepard exhaled heavily, gripping Garrus hands and making him hug her tightly from behind, not really caring that Wrex was next to them. She needed the reassurance, and she needed his arms holding her, helping her not to turn into a million pieces.

Through the years, it wasn’t often when she didn’t wonder how a man so alien to her could transform into the only one that could give her what she needed, the only one that could understand her so much that she didn’t even need words to express herself to him; only a movement of her head, or a stare, or a twitch of her lips.

Her mind drifted into a moment when they were at the Citadel, trying to catch her sick joke of a clone. If she had to be honest, in that moment she wasn’t even focusing on what he was saying—his black and white suit hugged his worked up body in some ways she never could imagine—but she recalled one of his phrases, even the amazed tone of both his vocals when he said it; _You got some looks. So did I, though the ones directed at me said, “How did a turian like that get a girl like her?” Hell if I know._

Hell if _she_ knows how a girl like her could get a turian like him.

But the sound of geth ships and reinforcements on the distance made their little bubble broke up again, making her grunt in disappointment and step away from his embrace. Her Commander stance and resolve was slipping away from her ever so slightly, but she needed to hold onto it if they were going—or trying—to make a difference in this twisted experience she and Garrus were having.

Her tone and body shifting into her Commander one, she turned on her companions with a resolute nod, more decided than ever. “Let’s find Saren, and kill him.” She sentenced, already gripping her pistol.

A reload from Garrus’ assault rifle and Wrex’ fists crashing onto each other agreed with her, “Finally something we can all agree to.” He said, eager to follow her.

* * *

Saren hopped off through his platform, his shield covering all the volley of shots Shepard and her team were displaying onto him. He released his biotics on her, forcing her to search for cover and have the initiative in their encounter. “This has been an impressive diversion, Shepard. My geth were utterly convinced the salarians were the real threat.” He started, his vocals not really showing the surprise his words said he was having, “Of course, it was all for nothing. I can’t let you disrupt what I’ve accomplished here. You can’t possibly understand what’s really at stake.”

And for his last sentence, his vocals expressed the sincerity of it. Shepard tried to hide her annoyance at his words; she was not really looking forward to a conversation with him, at least not this time. It hadn’t worked last time, so why should she waste her breath now?

Looking through the corner of her eye, she saw Garrus silently and slightly taking away his sniper rifle, so she decided to play along, at least for a while. “I understand, Saren. I really do. I know that you think that the Reapers cannot be stopped, but you must believe me when I said that _they can_.” And she opted to change her speech, because she knew where her questions had taken her the last time. It was useless to ask those kinds of questions to him.

“Do not mire yourself in pointless revolt. Do not sacrifice everything for the sake of petty freedoms. The Protheans tried to fight, and they were utterly destroyed!” Saren retorted, insisting on his reasonable but still, pointless and ignorant line of thought. “But what if they had bowed before the invaders? Would the Protheans still exist? Is submission not preferable to extinction?”

“The Reapers will not let us live, and it is you who must understand that!” She gripped her pistol harder than she wanted to, trying to force away her anxiousness and the frustration crawling through her body. “I’ve seen things that you could never imagine, Saren. I’ve seen your home world burning in a blaze of orange and red, and not even submission could help your own species to avoid the inevitable!”

But Saren just gave her a shake of his head, cybernetics and tubes twisting and contorting on his movement, “Now you see why I never came forward with this to the Council, or another Spectre like you. We organics are driven by emotion instead of logic.” he started to pace around, gathering and considering her words for a moment, and Shepard could saw how Garrus was hiding in his cover the best he could, preparing his scope and looking for the weak spot he needed to end everything once and for all.

Saren turned his head at her, his arms limp to the sides, his stance very relaxed for a turian surrounded by three well-armed enemies, “But if you think I’m wrong, still, why do you bother then, Shepard? Tell me… why do you fight a battle and a war you cannot possibly win?”

That made Garrus’ trigger finger twitching in the air, turning his eyes to her, and also made her lungs stopped their breathing for a moment, the wave of questions she wasn’t having strength to answer coming again to her mind and making her head pound. _What if he’s right? What if we are here because we have already lost the war? What if Garrus and I were the only ones that could make a difference and now… and now they made the work of getting us into this sort of loop and trapped us, finally getting rid of us? What if they have already won?_

_Would you let fear consume you, or would you overcome?_

She forced her eyes close shut for a moment, stopping the impending amount of questions and doubts gathering in her mind, and she tried to focus on the matter at hand. With a deep sigh, she answered Saren, her voice wavering and not as strong as her Commander tone. “Because if I don’t fight, then our galaxy has already lost.”

She rose and left her cover, strengthening her back and fully showing herself to Saren as a proof of cooperation, “Together we can stop Sovereign and we can stop and beat _all_ the Reapers. You just need to believe me, Saren, or it will be your doom.” And Shepard just stared at him, her eyes glowing with pleading for him to just listen, to understand.

But a deep sigh of defeat from Saren’s sub vocals—a sound she had never heard before, because she had never learned on that time how to listen to those tones—came to her ears, making her realize that she was already too late to provide another chance to him as well. “I… no longer believe that, Shepard. They are too powerful—” he said, the pained tone obvious in his words.

“He’s already indoctrinated, Shepard, leave him be!” The very annoyed tone of Wrex shouted from the back of another cover in the distance. The interruption made Saren’s gaze shift again, the little keen of his vocals no longer singing in the air.

“I’m forging an alliance between us and the Reapers, between organics and machines,” he explained, his words getting spitted each second passing, “But you would undo my work, you would doom our entire galaxy to complete annihilation. And for that, you must die.”

“Not if we kill you first!” Wrex roared, jumping from his cover and not even caring for shooting at him with his shotgun but going straight at him in a fiery charge. And the battle started all of a sudden, Shepard coming out of her cover as well and displaying a large round of bullets into Saren’s shields, Garrus going straight at his weak spots with his sniper rifle.

She heard a crack from some shields turning down and saw Saren already releasing his biotics on them, but when Garrus started to move away from his cover and advance to get a better spot, she abandoned her way through Wrex and forced her run close to her boyfriend, attempting to provide him of some cover and also working as a bait—because she knew that Saren was mostly focused on her—jumping through covers and countering Saren’s biotics with her own in the process.

The first thing she knew about the battle is how she underestimated him. Because she didn’t realized—not until the last minute—that Saren wasn’t really releasing his attacks on her, but on her companions.

With a quick movement, Saren could avoid the charge from Wrex only for an inch, making the krogan crash into a set of crates, turning them into pieces, and Shepard leaped into a burst of speed, rushing to get to her friend and pushing him into some cover. And she was about to reach Wrex when suddenly Garrus roared in the distance.

“Shepard, _no!_ ” Her eyes widened, and she wanted to turn her head or somehow ask Garrus what was she doing wrong, but in the next second she knew her mistake.

Saren was too close to Wrex, and the krogan stretched an arm to her when he realized what was about to happen, but he could only protect her stomach when Saren’s pistol unleashed a large round of bullets on her. And she realized that her own shields had been broken before her running when the bullets penetrated her armor and her skin with a force that made her body been pushed backwards.

She felt the first bullet getting on her chest and coming out from her back, and also felt the second and the third. The last two bullets that ripped through her only made the air coming out of her lungs, making her fall on her back and into a pool of red blood.

A lot of noises started to gather on her ears, but when her head touched the floor with a loud thump, she felt like her skull, her brain and her implants were shaking from the force of her fall, clouding her gaze and her senses. Her nerves and not even a single limb from her body made a response to her demands, only her lungs battling and demanding for the little air she could muster, making her choke in her own blood in the process.

Someone got on his knees next to her, covering the light of the sun that was blinding her eyes, and a couple of three fingered hands took hold of her body, cradling her close. Her eyes blinked on its own accord, trying to focus on Garrus’ features in front of her face, and the next thing she heard above the roaring of a krogan and the sound of a platform coming to life was the most desperate keen she had ever heard.

He didn’t manage to whisper something to her, probably because not even his words of reassurance were going to save her, and she thanked him with her gaze fixing on his eyes—the most beautiful eyes that she ever saw in the entire galaxy—trying to smile with her lips stained and spluttering blood all over her.

His mandibles were trembling violently on his face, and he leaned close to her to nuzzle her dirty forehead before returning to her line of sight. “Oh, Jane…” he just said, blue blood coming out of one of his shoulders and painting one of her cheeks, making him marvel in the sight for one moment—if her brain wasn’t already toying with her and she could assume the shifting of his eyes correctly—and she started to choke again when she tried to mutter some words out of her throat.

Garrus silenced her with a talon tracing her face. “If you go, I go.” He sentenced, crouching and falling on the floor right next to her, a hand taking one of hers and another making her turn her head and look at him, “Close your eyes. It’ll… it’ll be over soon.” he started to pant heavily. With what was left of her strength, she used it to grip her fingers on his hand in the best way of reassurance she had, her eyes already speaking for her, the silent _I love you_ hanging on the air.

The last thing she could saw before obeying him and closing her eyes was the sight of a suffocating turian next to her. And the last thing she heard was the sound of a bullet that she knew it hadn’t grazed her body, but still adorned her face and neck with warm and slick blood, not belonging to her.

The next—again—was her unexpected return to the void.


	4. With the full force of a dying star

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s been hard to describe how is it to be on the “void”, like being dead but at the same time being alive, in a place where Shepard is, somehow, trapped and doesn’t belong. The void, the “nightmares” and the first scenes of every chapter are the really core of the story, so I hope that the words written for the scene are accurate for you, because given that my native language is Spanish, it’s very hard for me to make such a precise description in another language. Anyway… If you have any questions, I’m more than willing to answer them.

The whispers were distant but, at the same time, they were tougher, unforgiving. Like if they had been demanding her to do things for so long and were getting tired of trying. The voices penetrated her ears, getting into her ears like sharp needles.

Insistent. That was the accurate word for it.

 _Open. Your. Eyes._  

When she obeyed, she thought for a moment—for a whole second—that she finally avoided the darkness, somehow; that she was finally dreaming or wandering around in whenever the human souls go when they die. A solid cream-pale roof was displaying on her line of sight, almost confirming her theory.

But her head—resting on some cold tile that her scalp never felt—shifted to the view of a window, and there it was again: The landscape of never-ending stars and emptiness. Her lungs tried for air and no single oxygen passed through her throat, no matter how much she insisted to breathe.

Her hands looked for purchase and she gathered some strength to lift the upper half of her body from the floor she was resting, blinking hard and trying to clear her blurred vision. Somehow, somewhat, her chest filled with a kind and warm feeling of relief. _If I’m here again, it means that I’ve got another chance_ ; it was what she could figure about her recent experiences, and she couldn’t blame herself for having that nice feeling when she thought about it that way.

“No, you must open your eyes,” this time it wasn’t a familiar voice that insisted to her, but a lot of voices at once, their words reverberating in her ears and filling the space—if someone could call the void like that—around her.

Trying to focus on her surroundings, she gasped at the sight—a useless reflex that had no kind of result in the emptiness, because again, no sound came from her lips—her hands starting to tremble and her legs suddenly moving, kicking and scrambling to get up and just to stay away from the ten corpses lying on the floor. 

The corpses were covered in bags, only their heads clear for her to see, and their lips were still moving, repeating and mumbling the single three words that were echoing in the room for what she seemed it was an eternity. “Open your eyes.”

“Cascading waves of change.” The synthetic tone she didn’t want to hear came from behind her back, surpassing and silencing the whispers. She wasn’t ready to look behind her shoulders and face Harbinger’s wrath, so instead she fixed her gaze on the ten corpses wrapped in bags and displayed in a semi-circle on the floor, trying—somehow—to listen to their whispers and mute the Reaper’s voice behind her.

But in the next second, like if everyone—or everything in that place—knew what she was trying to do, what she was trying to avoid, a breeze came through her left, caressing her face and moving strands of her hair to her cheek and forehead. And just like that, the corpses closed their mouths and stopped whispering to her.

She kept crawling backwards from the bodies, very aware that they weren’t going to speak to her again, but her hands froze in their place when a shadow started to appear on the floor, and she recognized a familiar body in the shape of it. She craned her neck and looked behind one of her shoulders, suddenly forgetting about what could lay behind her and anxious to look for the source of the shadow.

Garrus was on his knees, his arms resting on his sides and his chin touching the blue C-Sec heavy armor on his chest. His gaze was on the gray tile, looking at nothing at all, and he was still… so very still, like turned off.

It was the most devastating image of a defeated turian, and she felt her eyes watering and her heart clenching in pain just with the sight of it.

She crawled close to him, slowly, very conscious of what happened last time when she touched him, and she was starting to guess that the turian in front of her wasn’t really him, because he wasn’t even breathing, or blinking, or displaying any kind of signs that he was alive. A pale red light came from the roof, reflecting itself in the gray tile and in his silver plates, washing over them both.

“We will change our fate.” Harbinger declared from above, but when its words reverberated again—lightly shaking the room and her body with the force of the voice—its echoes shifted when the sound returned to her ears, changing the sentence and making her frown.

The resonance seemed to say _He will change our fate. He will change. He will. He…_

When the red light started to turn off, the reflection of it on Garrus’ face made her imagine that his lips were moving, and she returned the whispers to the back of her head to focus on getting close to him. Then, when she reached him, she realized that she wasn’t imagining anything.

His lips were really moving, very slightly, almost like if he was talking to himself, his face still facing the cold tile. She knew she wasn’t able to speak to him, even if she wanted to, so she moved closer to his face, her head leaning to the side and trying to listen to his silent whispers.

“I will find you. I will bring you back to me. I will find you. I will bring you back to me…”

 _Garrus, I’m here_. She forced herself to speak, just like last time, when she couldn’t voice her words but somehow he had heard her. There was no response from him this time, but the slightest flutter of mandibles. His mouth kept muttering the same sentences over and over with no pause, like an eternal prayer.

She was craving to touch him, and one of her hands rose from the floor and approached his cheek, shaking violently at the proximity. She wanted, somehow, for him to look at her, to acknowledge her presence, but how could she do that in a place where she obviously didn’t belonged? Where she was just a shadow, a wandering ghost… an intruder in someone else’s nightmares?

Her eyes shifted to the gray tile from Archangel’s base, and the inevitable questions gathered again in her head. She could saw both of their faces reflected on the dirty floor, she _could saw_ his empty eyes, black and dark as the stars above them. _Why we have to go through this? Why—how—did I put you through this? Why can’t you_ see me _?_

His head rose from his chest, slowly, like moved by invisible threads and hands controlling him like a marionette, and her hand froze in the air. He blinked and blue eyes gazed at her face. If turians could cry, she was absolutely sure that he would be crying in that moment. “Please Jane… get me out of here,” he implored, and her lower lip trembled at the sound of his keening vocals, not able to turn away from those eyes that were begging her, pleading with all the remaining strength he had. “Please, please… _open your eyes_.”

* * *

Another ceiling was displayed in front of her when her eyes opened wide, a metallic grey reflecting a white light bulb placed a few meters into the room. It wasn’t like a mirror, but the sheet of metal was enough to watch her own figure on it, dressed in a simple black tank top with matching shorts, laying and a little tangled on thin white blankets over a bed.

Shepard craned her neck, her pupils dilating for a second and adjusting to the orange glowing of a hologram, a screen placed on a desk carefully located next to a door she very well knew. The terminal was on stand-by, tilting a bit and showing the symbol of the Systems Alliance.

The thing that made her frown was that the door from her commander’s quarters was with a red lock—she wasn’t used to lock the doors of her room, not that she was complaining about it, it simply wasn’t something that she do—and it was a silly thing to focus at, because she never intended for privacy on her quarters in the SR-1, but she was starting to notice how the simplest of things could change everything around her.

She moved away from the blankets, looking at her surroundings, feeling that she wasn’t alone in her quarters. The sound of water turning off came from her private bathroom, confirming her theory and filling her head with other questions. _That was Liara on her bathroom? What was she doing? And why could she be here, in her locked quarters, in the middle of the night? Is it the middle of the night? Were they… were they heading to Ilos?_

She remembered rejecting Liara when she came to her quarters, after she stole the Normandy and headed away with her team from the Citadel. Maybe this time it’s the one when she accepted her? _This time… what are you talking about?_ A voice in her head asked her with exasperation. _You don’t even know what’s happening around you, the only thing you know is that Harbinger is somehow playing with you, toying with you, forcing you to do something when you activated the Cru—_

“Jane?” another voice that wasn’t definitely in her head whispered with an intake of breath, turning off her mind and making her blink. Her mouth gaped at the sight of a turian dressed in only black sleeping pants, one of his hands holding tightly the door of her bathroom, his face evidently surprised to see her, to find themselves in the same room.

“Garrus? Is… is that—?” she panted, forcing her body to move out from the bed. Of course it was him; nobody had called her by her given name except him—not even the young Garrus she knew on the SR-1, back in their days of chasing Saren—she wasn’t sure why was she even asking that. But she was glad to do it when the happy trill of his vocals answered her, his mandibles moving to give her the brightest smile, and his feet started moving to her bed, eager to close the distance between them.

She answered his movements with a newfound energy, crawling suddenly to the foot of her bed and jumping on all fours to his waiting and open arms, crushing on his chest and body and tucking her head on his neck, his hands already gripping her thighs and placing them on his hip spurs, rushing on their need to embrace each other, to feel the skin of each other, to hug each other so tightly that they could both feel their hearts beating like a hammer behind their ribs.

She craned her neck and took one of his cheeks, kissing him with all she had, desperate whimpers and tears coming out of her without resistance. He returned her movements with the same intensity, an arm enclosing her waist and a hand getting into her hair, holding her scalp, trying to get her even closer to him. Their tongues caressed each other, making a warm heat expand through her chest to her lower parts, and their necks moved frantically, their foreheads stroking with the movements, each skin cell craving and pleading to be touched.

He was the first one to reach out for a little air, allowing her to move to his mandibles and neck with a movement to the side, “Where are we?” Garrus panted, his sub vocals constricting, like trying to find some sense between their ministrations but losing the battle—if his rising purrs and lustful growls were saying something to her—his hands roaming over the body clinging to him, “Is this… maybe we need to look for—?”

“I don’t care,” she interrupted him, her voice firm, and she grazed her teeth on his neck before fixing her eyes on him, her gaze dark and serious, “I don’t fucking care about anything because you’re here now, and without you nothing makes sense to me anymore.”

Her tone was loaded with desire, but also hard as stone, decisive, and he was staring at her demanding expressions, his cobalt eyes acknowledging every single word that came from her mouth. Shepard gripped one of his cheeks and the back of his neck, lowering his head and touching her brow to his, their gazes still fixed, entranced in the other. “We have been together, we will _always_ be together, and we are together now. Fuck the galaxy… _fuck everyone._ ” She muttered through clenched teeth, giving him a heated gaze that contained all and was making him pant even more.

The tones of his vocals agreed with her, making his naked chest vibrate and resound within her, and she didn’t needed any other sign before her throat released a wanting moan and returning to his neck, biting harshly and making him gasp in pleasure. Her legs enclosed and gripped his waist, knowing what her ministrations were doing to him, feeling how he was tugging with her tank top with his free hand while leading them to the bed.

They fell together on top of the blankets, her lungs emptying when he almost crushed her with his weight, but no one seemed to pay mind to that and she was already tugging at his pants while he was desperately taking away her tank top and tossing it to the side. She helped him to pull him out of his clothes with her legs and feet and he did the same with the remaining of what she had left, using one hand to release her from the offensive clothing and holding himself with his other one, enclosed on her back.

“I love you,” he murmured when they finished undressing each other, tilting her head back and nipping at the skin of her throat, “I love you more than anything.” His sharp teeth grazed her neck and when his knees found the place on the sides of her body, one of his hands roamed over the top to the bottom of her back, talons accidentally scratching her skin, while the other was gripping her curved hip, pulling her closer.

Her parted lips found the sensitive spot beneath his mandibles, and her nails raked through the back of his neck, her other hand grabbing his back and trying to touch and pull him to her however she could. One of her legs embraced one of his and the other climbed to his waist, demanding, making him rub his already unsheathed cock over the back of her ass and her folds. The only thing she could let go of him was his mandibles, her lips opening to moan shamelessly close to his ear.

His body was always made of pure heat when it was against her skin, so hot that sometimes she didn’t even needed another incentive but just the feel of his hide against her. His mouth captured hers again while he placed himself between her thighs, their tongues and lips swallowing each other’s moans and whimpers, each demand that their bodies were giving. Because there was no need for words for about what each other was pleading, because both of them knew each other’s bodies by now.

And because this wasn’t about lust, it wasn’t about desire, but an impending and crushing need to feel each other, to become one with the other, their hearts, their souls, their spirits intertwined. To move, and scream, and touch, and feel alive and together, like a prayer and a promise to never—ever—let go.

Not even in the eternity.

He laced his fingers through hers and brought one of her hands up above her head, leaving the other one that was tugging and scratching the back of his neck, and she lifted her hips towards his, rubbing herself once more against his throbbing cock before he entered her in a single thrust. They both let out a deep moan that echoed through the room and he let go of her mouth, burying his face on her neck and her shoulder, not really able to pause and let her accustom to his length.

His mouth captured the flesh over her collarbone and his pace started to recede, like if he was having a battle between his self-control and the overwhelming instincts gathering on both of them. One of her hands traveled to his cheek, making him crane his neck and look at her flushed face. They locked their gazes for a few seconds while he kept sliding out and back into her, and between her pants she managed to found her voice. “I love you so much.” She just said, seeing her reflection through his heated and bright blue eyes.

Her words seemed to resolve his inner battle, because he captured her lips in his again and started to pound into her with force, with a possessiveness that matched his sub vocals; those vocals that were screaming wildly with his love to her but it also seemed to say _mine, mine, mine_ with each thrust and movement of his hips.

And his tones were so erotic to her, his vocal sounds so maddening and so _his_ that it didn’t took long for her thighs to tighten around his waist, for her back to arch and her chest pleading for more contact, his cock and hips rubbing, touching and stroking all over her spots and feeling the heated pressure building in her stomach, making her toes curl and her nails to bury deeper on his hide.

She released his lips and turned her head to the left, crying out his name. She felt herself constricting him, clamping around him harder than ever before, and he grunted at the sensation of that and her hands grabbing his neck and fringe and pulling his head down to press his lips against her throat.

When he obeyed and sunk his teeth into her neck, her orgasm slammed into her, making her body convulse and all her muscles to constrict around him, inciting him to the edge with her. And he came with a roar, exploding inside of her, his own mouth clamped on her neck making her whole body to shake with his tones, finally becoming one with the other.

They reached the stars together—not the void, but the other kind of stars—feeling how their voices, their bodies twined with one another, how their heartbeats encompassed each other and breathing their essences together. Shepard knew that there was no other better sensation that made her feel as _alive_ as in that moment.

She didn’t let go of him even when he fell to her side, even when his hands caressed her body, and not even when he whispered “I love you,” in all the forms he could and with all his vocals.

“You found me,” she whispered very low, hiding her face in his neck, her body curling against his, melting and drinking in his warmth, “You always do.”

“And always will.” he answered, pulling her close. “We’re together to the end… and beyond.”

* * *

“ _Commander, you’re needed at the deck, we’re being attacked!_ ”

Joker’s voice came through the comms and straight to her ears when she woke up again, making her head pound and her muscles to twitch at the sudden awakening. Her eyes blinked rapidly, and she could saw her boyfriend swiftly closing his armor.

“ _Brace for evasive maneuvers!”_ She jumped straight out of the bed when the room started to shake, her heart pounding so much that she felt like it was about to make its way through her ribs. Of course she knew what was happening. They were on Alchera. “ _Kinetic barriers down, multiple hull breaches, weapons offline… somebody get that fire out!”_

She made her way through her armor in record time, clasping and buckling the parts in a way that she knew how to do, even with her eyes closed. “Jane!?” Garrus shouted, and when she found his face, she understood his panic.

She froze for a second, trying to manage her thoughts. _He had never lived this experience. He never went through Alchera. How am I supposed to do this, then?_ A sudden movement of the floor made her return to the present and the matter at hand, making Garrus gasp and search for his helmet, whenever that could be.

She found both of them inside her armor locker, throwing his helmet at him, forgetting for once about weapons. Someone screamed outside her quarters and she took a deep breath, feeling the adrenaline rushing through her veins and strengthening her resolve.

This time, Garrus was blind, and she was the only one that could do something. “Help me to activate the pods,” Commander Shepard said to him, one of her hands clutching her helmet and the other taking his hand and pulling him outside of her quarters. She only let go of him to put her helmet on, watching through her periphery how he was imitating her actions.

“Shepard! Garrus!” Liara was running to them while she and her boyfriend were moving through the sleeping pods, avoiding the fires and the wiring falling through the roof. “Shepard, orders?”

She guided Garrus to a blinking screen on the end of the hall while she managed to grab some extinguishers, giving one to Liara who was clasping her helmet into place. Something inside of her sighed when she realized that she didn’t took some time to look at the face of her asari friend, but threw those thoughts to the back of her mind with a blink. _It’s useless now; I’ve got a crew to dispatch, a turian to guide, and all of our asses to save somehow._ “Distress beacon is ready for launch!” shouted Garrus a few meters ahead of her, already entrancing himself in another screen with a frantic pace.

“Will the Alliance get here in time?” Liara asked, managing to keep straight despite the movement from the floor. Shepard started her work of pulling some wires to activate another screen.

“I don’t know, but I need you to get everyone onto the escape shuttles,” she answered, holding on a pod when the med bay exploded and the whole deck trembled. Garrus’ head craned at her in the distance, and Shepard knew what he was thinking just with the way his body went still in his place.

“Joker is still on the cockpit, he’s not leaving the ship!” Liara managed to say, using the extinguisher to give them some place to walk while Shepard and Garrus worked on the emergency protocols. “I’m not leaving either!”

Shepard finished with the first wiring, but Garrus was already taking care of the second. Still, she moved close to him to help him with the security access and activating the distress beacon, “I need you to take the crew and get them onto the shuttles, Garrus and I will take care of Joker.”

Her boyfriend looked at her again, taking acknowledgment of what she was saying, but she knew that he wasn’t leaving her side even if she begged him to. Liara sighed through her comm, but accepted her command with a “Yes, Commander,” before reluctantly taking her leave to the bottom deck.

Garrus got out of her way when she returned to work on the shuttle activation, holding himself with a hand on a pod, “What can I do that you can’t?” he asked in a grave voice, his sub vocals muted this time. She hesitated with the screen, her head craned at him and her mind already looking for all the possible outcomes for them.

_He will change our fate._

_He can help me to make things faster_ , it was the only answer that she found. She reached for his hand and pulled him to the screen in front of her, “Activate the shuttles to drop off while I’m on my way to get Joker,” she ordered, an arm trying to cover them both when another explosion reached close to them. Garrus took hold of one of her shoulders, and she knew what he wanted to say, but there was no time to explain furthermore, “We’re leaving on the shuttle from the cockpit. Activate the other evac and meet me there.”

When he let go of her shoulder unwillingly, she nodded to him in reassurance and made a run to the cockpit, trying as best as she could to avoid the fire and the dangerous places that were about to crumble down, climbing the stairs in a rush. _Oh God, let him get through this._ The mag boots were too slow for her liking, and the stars were up above her in the destroyed deck, gazing upon her menacingly.

“Joker! Joker!” she cried to her pilot in the distance, grabbing and grappling of what she could to make her way to him faster. “We need to get out of here!”

He was working on his screens, moving between them like a pianist and half entranced in his work, and it was like she was cursed to watch again how he wanted to throw his life away in front of her. “I won’t abandon the Normandy, I can still save her.” He said behind her breather.

This time she was having none of it. He wasn’t the only one that needed to get out of there. “I’m taking you to the shuttle whether you like it or not,” she declared, taking one of his arms and pulling him out of his chair, despite his protests and the sound of one of his bones breaking under his arm.

Both of them limped to the shuttle, and she helped her pilot to make his way through one of the chairs. “Where are you going!?” he cried when she stepped out, but she didn’t looked at him. “Commander!”

She craned her neck to the cockpit and finally saw Garrus… limping on his mag boots, a hand clutching at one of his shoulders and trying to make his way to her. Her heart started to pound harder, her feet already forcing her way to him, trying to make it faster. She just needed to grab his hand, pull him to her, and push them both into the escape shuttle. They were going to make it.

Something bright and hot started to blind her on her left. Joker’s screams were filling her ears and, somehow, none of the two living people on the Normandy were walking fast enough to grab each other before the burning ray from the Collector ship broke the cockpit in half.

They were _not_ going to make it.

Garrus was insisting on his walking—slow but steady as he could—but his hand wasn’t already outstretched to her, and her surroundings seem to froze around her for a moment. On her front, she had Garrus, the man she loved, and on her back she had her only way to survive. The only thing she needed to do was turn around, get into the shuttle and try to wait for Garrus as long as they could. At least, that was what he was trying to say to her, if she understood the tones of his vocals correctly.

The floor of the cabin started to crumble around her, announcing her that she needed to face a decision. Do or die.

_I will find you. I will bring you back to me…_

“ _SHEPARD!_ ” two voices screamed with all the air in their lungs. And the cabin exploded in a blaze of fire, her boots no longer touching the floor.

The only thing she could do was to press the button to close the shuttle’s doors, helping herself with that hand on the wall to defy gravity and pull her body to Garrus, outstretching her other arm to him, who was already been pulled away from the floor with the force.

The cockpit, the decks below and the whole ship rippled in half in front of her, hundreds of pieces of debris pushing and pulling her away from Joker, from the cabin, onto the deep expanse of space.

Her back crushed on an armored chest, making her grunt, and an arm that didn’t belonged to her encircled her chest, grabbing her from her back. She tried to entangle her limbs with Garrus, making a way for them to not let go of each other while both of them started to float away from what was left of the ship. Both of their comms were shattering and breaking communication, but she could still hear Joker’s screaming her name on his end.

“I’ve got you,” Garrus panted behind her, the side of his helmet pressing on the top of hers and a leg spur grabbing one of her armored knees, making no way for her to fly apart from him, not even in zero gravity. She sighed deep in response, lolling her head back and placing it on one of his shoulders that wasn’t burned up.

There was a final beam that made what was left of the Normandy to explode into a million pieces, and the force pushed them onto Alchera’s atmosphere with more speed. All kinds of debris were floating around them, but her heart was no longer racing and pounding on her chest like a few moments ago.

They were falling at an incredible speed, but it was alright, because Garrus was on her back. And they were going to die in any second, but still, they were going to go together. After all, after having died alone and floating into nothing the last time, this time it was almost poetic to her. _A much better way to go_ , she thought to herself, her hand finding the one that was gripping her chest and shoulder and closing her five gloved fingers on his three ones.

She closed her eyes—the sight of space was beautiful, but it was also the first source of her nightmares—relaxing on Garrus’ shoulder, hearing only his soft panting close to her helmet. “I really thought that we were going…”

She couldn’t end her sentence before something hissed on the back of her neck, making Garrus’ head behind his helmet to flinch away from hers, trying to find out what was going on.

Of course. It was her breather.

Both of them stretched their free hands to help her with the air duct, trying to stick it into place, but there was nothing she or Garrus could do. The duct was broken in half. _No, no! This isn’t fair, nothing about this is fair!._ “Fuck!” It was all she could say, already losing her remaining oxygen and wriggling uselessly above Garrus’ body, trying to do something with her helmet.

He was the only one really conscious about the situation they were enduring, grabbing her wrist on his free hand and forcing her to stay still on his arms. _His breather is still on_ , she thought in a rushed moment, but at her next forced breathing, comprehension started to dawn on her. _They were falling like an asteroid to a freezing planet. Of course they were going to die anyway._

She craned her neck to look through his helmet when one of his hands went to the clasps of her armor, and she could see the devastating gaze he was giving her behind the glass. Her eyes started watering from the lack of air and the task she was silently approving him to do. “It’s alright… it’ll be just a second,” he said to her, his sub vocals going wild with shattering tones of misery and despair.

When he removed her helmet, she took another second to stare and bore onto his eyes, her tears floating and joining with the item and the debris around them, her mouth opening to instinctively grasp for oxygen and feeling how every muscle was constricting and shaking inside her armor. Two of his talons went to her eyelids, making her eyes close before directing his hand to her throat.

All his vocals trembled with the last sentence she heard from him, “Together… to the end and beyond.”

She managed to smile at him before he took the life away from her, quick and painless. She didn’t even felt or heard the sound of her neck being broken, but she was sincerely glad that he accepted to kill her before having to die again from suffocation.

And when she no longer felt his touch, or heard his keening next to her ear, she knew that Garrus’ didn’t actually killed her, but made her return to the void.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please, if you can tell me if you liked this, or how you felt when you read this chapter, I will be more than thankful.  
> Anyway, thank you a lot for reading, following, kudoing (?) and liking the story. I know I’ve said this a lot, but it reeeeeeeally means a lot to me <3


	5. I will find you if you’re near or far

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And *finally* I could finish this part of the story. Damn, this took me a quite longer than I’d expected. But before reading, I wanted to make a few clarifications:  
> This is where the **explicit part** starts. I must warn you about that, and take a look at the tags before reading, because this chapter contains **MORE** than the average amount of violence. I even dared to tag this with ‘Mild gore’ because better safe than sorry, right?  
>  So yeah, I’ve already deleted a couple of scenes to not make this chapter more bloody than it needs to be, but please, **read at your own advice**.
> 
> Now, onto the second thing I need to say: Thanks to a couple of questions I’ve received about this story, I want to make sure that we are on the same page here and this gets understood:  
> I’m trying very hard to not create a paradox here, so I must explain that in this story, what is really going on with Shepard and Garrus is that, in every chapter, they are ‘travelling’ (in a some sort of twisted way) between alternate realities, or multiverses. And they ‘take the place’ of their own versions from that reality/universe.  
> But whatever happens to them in that reality/universe, the very essences of them are not really affected, just the Shepard and Garrus that existed before their arrival. And well, that’s the best explanation I can give about how they die but keep ‘traveling’ between realities and keep returning to this creepy void created by Harbinger. I’m going to change the tag now to ‘AU – Multiverses’ just to make sure and to not confuse anyone else.

Her hands clutched her throat in desperation and she gasped and gulped mouthfuls of air, but even as she felt her lungs expanding, no oxygen reached through them. Then, a sob that nobody—not even her own ears—heard, as the memories started to gather in her mind, inside her head, like little pinpricks and needles stabbing and gashing her skull.

She wanted everything to stop, but the void, the _fucking void_ was still pulling her in. She was still returning here and she craved, begged, pleaded for a way out. And a soft breeze brushed over the back of her neck, almost caressing her skin with a following whisper that seemed to answer her pleas.

_Open your eyes._

She stood up from some gray tile and found that her feet were bare, like almost the entirety of her body, only clothed in dirty, rotten and stained underwear. And what she first felt in this new unwanted arrival wasn’t cold, or fear.

It was fury, it was _rage_. An uncontrollable anger boiling up through and into her blood, as she faced what was probably another of Harbinger’s tricks, but her face softened when in the place of the landscape of stars and emptiness, now she found out that she was standing in a dark and wide room.

Still, it wasn’t enough to soothe her. _Show yourself, you motherfucking piece of shit,_ her lips moved and muttered, and no voice came out of her. _Come on, bastard, face me and put an end to this crap_. Her feet started to move with purpose, her figure only lightened with some soft white pale lamps placed over the roof, hanging and moving to the side with the sudden breeze of the never-ending room, and she kept talking, maybe to maintain some of her sanity, maybe to not feel as alone as she felt in that moment, maybe to forget just for a second where she was, it didn’t matter. _I dare you to face me, asshole. I’m fucking tired of your fucking tricks, face me and kill me already!_

The ground shook like if an earthquake was just passing, and the white pale lamps brightened in red, the loud screeching noise of a reaper reverberating into the walls and into her almost naked body, but Harbinger didn’t said a word and the red glowing disappeared just as quick as it came. “Open your eyes.” A soft female voice said, worn out, weak and unfamiliar but sounding older if she judged the tones right. 

Slowly, as if everything was some kind of sick test, figures of pale, thin, bleeding bodies started to appear close to the walls, right just where the light wasn’t reaching them, shrouding themselves in the acquainted dark and cold tile. Some of them were hugging themselves, protecting their bodies from something she wasn’t aware of what it was. Her eyes opened wide when she took a better look at the people spread through the room.

What she first thought is that she was gazing at corpses, but the corpses were _breathing_. Some of them were missing limbs, but the most of them had gashes all over their bodies. A muted gasp rippled through her throat when a turian woman made herself a little visible, both of her hands clutching her stomach and trying—uselessly—to place her own entrails back into her body.

She tried to step closer to a couple of the unknown figures but she couldn’t reach anyone, because they started to crawl back into the shadows at her proximity, like desperate into getting within their own familiar resemblance of protection and coming back to lick  their own wounds or just die alone and helpless. The sight was… unnerving, to say the least.

The only thing she could do was to focus on her surroundings as the gleaming red light made its appearance once again, and she tried to take the advantage to actually _see_ where she was, if there was a way out from that room, or if there was someone, anyone that she could beat to death for that butchery that was all around her.

But the room was mute, absent of every single sound, and that was the most unnerving thing of all. Humans and turians were choking in their own blood, batarians were muttering inconsistencies, salarians and quarians were ripping their clothes to somehow stop the blood coming out of their gashes and lacerations. But she couldn’t hear anyone of them.

Only her silent wet steps through the stained floor, covered in purple, green, blue, red blood, as she kept walking to nowhere in particular. Only the sound of her own breathing as she felt the nonexistent air and her blood reaching up to her brain and strengthening her rage, her wrath, her need to kill the responsible for that carnage, or at least die trying.

Her feet stopped right on its tracks when a naked human infant appeared on her way. He was on his knees, hugging himself with his little thin hands, but the dim light wasn’t pointing at him, and his face was shrouded in the shadows. “Open your eyes.” The boy pleaded to her, and his voice was so thin and weak that it made her knees tremble and her heart to stop pounding inside her chest.

The child started to sob, silent, faintly, almost to his insides, and she couldn’t avoid reaching out for him, to the only person around the room that she could hear and it wasn’t already trying to run away from her in fear. With a deep breath—or in an attempt to fill her lungs—she made her best to soothe herself from her rage and tried to help the kid, even though he didn’t seem harmed. In the small light, she realized that there were no gashes or punctures on his small body, no blood coming out from him—with the exception of the already stained floor where he was resting—but overall and in contrast with the people around her, he seemed… fine.

She stretched a hand to the boy in an attempt to get him up on his feet, but started to hesitate when something _changed_ in the air, around the room. It was a strange feeling, as if some kind of energy was insisting, encouraging, trying to _convince_ her to aid that child, and with her hand in middle-air she recognized that strange sensation.

_This is a trap, and I’m falling right into it._

Two sets of small hands grabbed her wrist tightly, and the face of the boy was revealed to her. Her teeth clenched together and her first reaction was to pull her arm away, but the child gripped her harder, fingernails puncturing her skin.

The boy’s face was stained in red blood, two big scalpel-cut holes in the place were his eyes were supposed to be.

The white lights of the room returned to the gleaming red again and the mechanical screeching noise vibrated through the ceramic walls. “Embrace your rage,” the boy muttered in the mechanical voice of Harbinger, “Accept what is inevitable… and _change._ ”

The resonance of the disembodied voice shifted again—just like the last time—changing the words, making everything tremble around her. _Change… change… Transform…_

_Evolve._

The air moved around her with the sudden force of wind, and the ground started to shook again, this time more violent, and the blind boy moved away from her, returning to the shadows and balancing himself on his knees, just like every person around the room. The gleaming red light returned, this time stronger, reaching through places around her that the light couldn’t reach before, making another figure to reveal itself a couple of meters ahead of her, a slim thin man in light armor with his chest puffed out in some sort of pride.

Dr. Saleon grinned devilishly at her, his hands clasped behind his back, eyes glinting in arrogance and confidence; the very image of a psychopath.

But the only thing she could do was to stay right there on her spot, glaring at him, at the responsible of that carnage surrounding her. And it was _so tempting_ to just threw herself at him and rip off his head, tear away that smirk of his face with her bare hands, to punch and kick him until he was nothing but a sack of dark meat. But that was the catch, that salarian was the real trap in that nightmare where she was standing.

_Evolve._ The reaper voice was still echoing through the room, the floor shaking with heavy steps that seem to come closer to her spot, behind her. _Evolve_ , Harbinger repeated, and Saleon’s smirk grew wider. _Evolve_ , and the ground was shaking with such force that she had to make an effort to get some balance, but she wasn’t daring to turn back from that salarian and face what was behind her.

Something massive was heading her way, like a Brute speeding up his pace, puffing loudly and preparing to charge and smash her body. The now red lamps were shaking violently on the roof, pacing back and forth, moving and balancing in an almost entrancing way, like counting down the seconds to her before being killed or crushed by the monster behind her. And she closed her eyes, embracing what was coming.

_Transform. Evolve. Kill!_

Her breathing stopped and in the next second—with the sudden adrenaline rushing through her veins—she turned around in pure instinct, managing to grab or punch the monster that was right behind her. One of her hands managed to grasp something like a throat and her eyes flew open in surprise when she didn’t receive anything resembling a punch back.

A turian in C-Sec light armor took hold of her wrist with both of his hands, mandibles trembling violently in an attempt to get some air from her constricted grip on his throat and feet hanging in the air. “No, no… J—Jane!” Garrus choked in a panted breath, but even that she recognized him, and she clearly recognized his voice, she couldn’t do anything to release him from her grasp.

She tried to open her mouth, to blink, to do _something_ , but her body wasn’t responding to her. Instead, her fingernails dug into his hide, fingers gripping tighter on his throat, and his three fingered hands released her wrist in an attempt to tear away her fingers from him, scratching her bare arm, her palm, every place they could reach. “Jane… no!” He pleaded in a thin voice, his sub vocals screaming and begging in terror.

But in the next second, abruptly, he blinked hard, his cobalt blue eyes gazing upon her in some sort of recognition, and comprehension dawned at her as well, so hard and so sudden like a straight punch in her nose. And he spoke loudly, with all the remaining—and nonexistent—air in his lungs, “Open your eyes!”

* * *

Shepard’s lungs filled and expanded with recycled air, and her eyes flew behind her head at the sensation of oxygen reaching through her. “Commander,” the voice of a woman with Australian accent came to her ears, but it was hard to answer while dealing with the sudden dizziness that was overwhelming her.

A couple of hands took hold of her arms, but when her body managed to get into a sitting position, her guts clenched and twisted and she couldn’t do anything else but to lean to the side, barely holding herself with a trembling arm before throwing all the contents in her stomach beside her. She heard the woman again snorting in a disgusted tone, but did the nice job of pulling her hair away from her face before vomiting for a second and a third time.

The voice of an unknown man a couple of meters ahead of her helped her to broke her dizziness a little and be aware of where she was, “Looks like you broke the first rule of Afterlife,” the man informed the group, “Don’t order a drink from that batarian if you’re a human.”

“Wha—what?” she mumbled, doing a serious job of blinking hard to see through the fogginess of her vision.

“It’s just that batarian bartender who’s got a stick up his ass about a bunch of his people that died a while back.” a man in civilian clothes was making himself visible as her vision started to clear and focus, “Nobody does a thing about it, though. Humans aren’t exactly held in high regard around here after Torfan…”

“That bartender tried to poison her?” Another man spoke behind her, and giving the volume of his voice, Shepard noticed that it was the one that was helping her to stand up.

She shook her head and took a couple of breaths to gain some ground—and to finally _think_ of where she was, and what was going on around her—but it didn’t took long for her eyes to fly to the now barely trembling hand that was holding her body in place. An orange glowing scar was adorning her skin, from wrist to middle finger.

She kept evening her breathing while she gazed at her surroundings, figuring where to start from there. Miranda Lawson, always in her tight-fitted Cerberus clothes, was talking to the civilian about the bartender, and a glance behind her shoulder made Jacob Taylor enter to her line of sight. She got up on her feet in a rush, breath hitching and guts clenching again, but this time for a very different reason.

There wasn’t a single turian close to her.

For a moment, a part of her mind wondered about how being conscious now about her own state—and that was the realization that she was in her part-robot cybernetic body—was _helping_ her to get a fast recovery of her poisoned state. Human brain chemicals and conscious states of mind could be sometimes really helpful. _And sometimes that brain and consciousness can kill you, just like you attempted to kill your own boyfriend a few minutes ago._

Shepard placed a hand on Jacob’s shoulder, shaking her head again to push those thoughts away, because they were useless now. But she felt the need to ask, “Garrus… where’s Garrus?” and her voice trembled with the mention of his name, another part of her starting to be afraid of the answer.

Jacob blinked a couple of times, but it was Miranda who retorted, dismissing the civilian and returning to her side, “We have already spoke about him, Shepard,” she crossed her arms and her perfect brows furrowed in a little suspicion, “Your… _mate_ disappeared a few months ago after you were declared dead.”

The Commander imitated her furrowed expression at the mention of the word ‘mate’, and she tried to contain her lips to twist in reaction to her—again—displeased tone at the word. What the hell was she stating? Those words were just as confusing as Wrex’ ones, when he said that stupid banter about her and Garrus ‘behind the Mako’. What did they know that she didn’t?

Why was everyone stating that she and Garrus were together, when she remembered clearly that they started a serious relationship a couple of days after she found him on Menae, fighting the Reaper forces that were destroying his homeworld? Why suddenly everyone knew about their personal life?

A little voice inside her head—probably the voice of her consciousness—answered the questions for her. _Because this isn’t_ you _, because you’re in another twisting reality that Harbinger is creating for you to believe. Because that monster is trying to confuse you with illusions that aren’t real, because—_

Jacob took her out of her thoughts when he patted her shoulder some sort of empathy. “Don’t think too much about it, Commander,” he said in a comforting tone, “Even though the Illusive Man wasn’t able to find your husband, we can go to the Citadel after we’re done here. Surely the Council can give us some clues about his whereabouts.”

Shepard’s brows rose at the Operative’s words. Clearly he wasn’t disgusted or displeased like Miranda, his stance being like the entire opposite of his fellow crew member, but his words made her heart racing nonetheless. ‘Mate’? And now ‘husband’? _Well, that escalated quickly…_

Though, she found out that a part of her reaction was based on her own surprise about not being really repulsed at the idea. Actually, giving a second thought to that, she wasn’t offended or repulsed _at all_. Why should she feel like that? The Operatives were talking about the man she loves, after all. And while still focusing on that idea, assimilating that fact, the way at how the words _husband_ or _mate_ sounded in her head, something started to blossom inside her chest, warming her heart, soothing her confused feelings about the whole situation.

That little feeling blossoming in her chest made her remember his voice, his exact words to her, those beautiful set of vocals that she have learned to listen in their time together. Those sub vocals she couldn’t imitate but still learned to interpret, and that strange but welcoming way for those tones to not be heard, but to be _felt_ , getting right into her skin, whispering _I love you_ and _mine_ every time they had some moment for just the two of them.

_‘Jane Shepard-Vakarian?’ Yeah, I can get used to that_. Even when everything around her seem wrong, surreal, filled with a major amount of things she probably never could understand entirely, that particular sensation of _belonging_ felt just about right. Like something she could get used to. Like something to keep fighting for. Like…

_Transform. Evolve._

The disembodied voice felt like an invisible hand scratching its claws over her scalp, and she snapped right out of her thoughts, giving a sharp shake of her head and a little crack of her biotics in her knuckles.

Miranda was still giving her that little confused look, and she directed the next question at her to, mainly, wipe that frown of her perfect designed face. “What’s our next priority, Operative Lawson?” Shepard said, switching into her Commanding tone.

The Cerberus Operative was fast and quick to fall in line and followed her back into the club, “Getting the intel we need about the Professor and Archangel,” Shepard’s breath hitched silently at the mention of Garrus’ alter ego, but Miranda never heard her and kept her speech, “Probably we’ll get more by getting the information from Aria. She claims that she knows everything ongoing in her station, after all…”

* * *

Getting into Aria’s balcony was a pretty easy job, and after a small talk with her, getting the information she needed about Garrus’ whereabouts was even easier, and Shepard felt something strange gathering up in her wits.

The whole situation was very different from what she remembered. Garrus was supposed to be trapped in his base by the moment she came to Omega, and what Aria had stated in their short meeting, it was that the Archangel was getting surrounded, but not that he was being attacked. And even if that wasn’t strange, she wasn’t sure how Aria had been so willing to give her the information she needed to retrieve him.

Was the asari aware of Archangel’s real name? The only thing she said about him is that she knew that he was a turian, but nothing else of importance. A faceless turian turned into vigilante, messing with the big gangs, getting cornered, and with Kima District as his base of operations. Then, why she had this strange feeling that Aria knew something else? Why it was that everyone seemed to know something more? Something that she wasn’t?

_Because they’re not talking about_ you _, or the Garrus_ you _know and love._

Her head started to pound and the little voice in her head gave a silent snort before disappearing again into the dark corners of her mind, getting replaced with the soft humming noise from the skycar that was taking them to Kima District. Probably she needed to retrieve Mordin first, and try to get more information about the twisted reality she and Garrus were into, but a little part of her agreed with the thought of that, even if he wasn’t in real danger at the moment, she _needed_ to get to him first.

It was a very selfish thought, and Shepard was well aware of that, but the boiling anger she felt a couple of minutes ago, deep into that disgusting nightmare, that hadn’t disappeared entirely. Not even with those nice and surprising comments about the Shepard and the Vakarian from this reality.

She needed him beside her, no matter the circumstances. That wasn’t up to change, not before, not now, not ever.

The scenery in front of her was another part of that strange riddled puzzle of that new— _not technically new,_ she corrected herself, _but different—_ reality, and that scared her, filling her head with incoming questions and wondering how they were going to get through that new challenge that Harbinger was surely planning for them. _Is he going to be different this time? Are his men dead already? Aria has to have something to do about that, giving the way she talked about Archangel._

The bridge that was leading to his base was clear, silent and very empty. So _empty_ that she felt, for just a moment, that she had already killed the men, the freelancers within, but this was something entirely new for her. Something new because a large part of her never cared about those boys and girls that risked their lives for a careless cause that was trying to get into Archangel’s hideout, that part of her that was really aware that a large number of them were just _carnage_ , just a stupid and small piece to the operation to catch him in the open.

And Shepard walked through that empty bridge; even when nobody was really there, even when there wasn’t a single target for her to kill, but she did anyway, because _he_ was waiting for her on the other side. Her _mate_ , her _life_ , her _everything_. The single cause for her to live, to fight for, to survive.

_To transform, to evolve_.

And when she crossed the entrance, there he was, in all his might. Just a single turian wrapping up the bodies of his team into bags, covering their faces and giving them the most simple and honest rest they deserve, after all their time with Archangel. And it wasn’t enough, she knew that, but it was the little he could give to them. And she would have done the same, giving the circumstances. Her throat released a relieved sigh when she saw him working, moving, _breathing_ , being alive and keening silently while he kept his work of doing the very least he could do for his men.

His vocals rumbled in a thankful tone when she walked close to him, but he never turned to her. Instead, he finished his job and wrapped an asari into her correspondent plastic bag. His voice was flat when he spoke, “I couldn’t help it, Jane. I killed him…”

Miranda and Jacob lowered their weapons in shocked surprise, a few meters behind her, but she pay no mind to them as she crouched next to Garrus, a demanding hand searching for the free spots in his armor where she could touch his hide, where she could feel the warmth of him. While on his knees, he snatched a big armored arm to encircle her waist and pull her to him in an embrace.

“What happened?” Shepard asked, although she knew it was a silly question, because she knew who he had killed. After all, there were only ten bodies inside. Her boyfriend just sighed and took his time hiding his head in the crook of her neck, and just for a few moments she gave him the silence he needed.

He breathed her in, a warm rumbling from his vocals getting right into her skin and, after he collected himself, he spoke. “He betrayed us again, and this time I couldn’t… I just couldn’t let him go.” And his collected rumbling shifted, _transformed_ into a silent keening, only to be heard for her, and she never really heard his tones, but felt them, sweeping right into her muscles and making her ache everywhere.

She captured his head between her hands and kissed him fiercely, trying her best to swallow his pain, to capture everything that was making him clench in silent agony and use it in their favor. His arms wrapped her tightly, holding and pushing her close to him in the best way he could, which it was also the best way she had ever known. Her fingertips caressed a bite scar close to where his neck met his shoulder and her tongue slipped into his own, asking for forgiveness, giving him the strength they both needed, pleading and also demanding.

_Transforming. Evolving._

A noise of small shooting got into her ears, interrupting the warm rumble of Garrus’ vocals, “Shepard, we have company!” Jacob yelled in the distance, making her release her boyfriend with a groan of discomfort. Miranda was already out of sight, leaving a soft gleam of blue biotics behind her tracks, “Does your husband know a way out, a backdoor of some sorts?” The man asked while running to get some cover, close to the entrance.

Garrus craned his neck at Jacob so fast that she could hear and feel his muscles almost cracking, “Wh—what?” He mumbled, but he snapped out of his confusion just as fast when she leaned away from him, standing up and readying her weapons. His eyes turned to her and gleamed in the silent question while he imitated her actions.

“Yeah, we’re married now,” Shepard said in a low tone only for him to hear, one of her fingers pointing to her throat where her supposed bond mark were supposed to be—if it hadn’t been for the fact that she got resurrected and her scars erased from her skin—but the little smile in her lips never lasted for more than just a second. That wasn’t the appropriate moment to talk about that, after all.

His mandibles twitched in nice surprise when he touched his own neck and found the scar on his neck, clearly made from human teeth, but his gaze and focus flew away to the shooting and shouting ahead of the entrance of his hideout. “Backdoor, right… the basement it’s still open, we can make our way out through the garage.”

Shepard turned her back on him to assist Miranda with her own biotics and take a quick look at the bridge. Mercs in white and yellow armor from Eclipse were already making their way in from the other side, starting the first wave to get to Archangel. It was just like the first time, just in like their reality. _But why, despite coming here early, this is happening again?_

She threw a Barrier at Miranda and called the two Operatives to return to the base, “Leave them!” She barked, her need for blood and vengeance starting to creeping onto her skin, making her orange scars glow for a moment, “We’re making our way out through the garage!”

Garrus held the door open for them—although it was clear in the way that his mandibles fluttered when she step beside him that he was only worried about her safety—and locked the doors behind them, destroying a couple of boxes and wires in the process that were placed above the door with his sidearm, giving no chance to override the security codes. “Butler’s skycar must be here, I still remember his code,” he mentioned, taking Shepard’s hand and leading the way to the exit.

“And how is it?” Shepard said without thinking too much about it, actually focused on the turian next to her and the SMG on her free hand, gripped tightly.

He released her hand and left her with Miranda and Jacob to get to work in overriding the next door. A sigh escaped through his mouth when he talked next, “It’s ‘Nalah’… the name of his wife.” A second later, Shepard grunted in a tone of silent apology, mentally slapping herself for asking such delicate things.

The heaviness in the air didn’t lasted for long, though, because when the doors opened, they noticed that the garage was thick crowded with Blood Pack mercs. Miranda shouted a warning behind Shepard’s back and released her biotics on the closest couple of vorchas that were making their way to them. They didn’t need to be warned twice as they scrambled into cover, she and Garrus sticking their backs onto a cargo truck.

While Jacob and Miranda took care of the large group of varrens that were heading their way, and Garrus focused on head-shooting the vorcha mercs, something started to boil up in Shepard’s blood, just as the same time that her biotics started to tickle on her knuckles.

It was a sudden need for blood, for violence, for avenging what this whole station had made of and on Garrus. It was rage, pure and deadly rage creeping onto her skin just as what she had on her wretched and twisted nightmare. It was a death sentence, but it was a hot hunger for revenge, an overwhelming need to definitely _change things_ this time.

_Embrace your rage_ , the soft voice inside her head repeated Harbinger’s words for her, and she obeyed, throwing herself at the red krogan mercs a couple of meters ahead. _Embrace your rage_ , the voice echoed in her mind while her biotics exploded around her, Shockwaves and Warps destroying everything in her path. _Embrace your rage_ , the voice insisted while she ripped krogan’s heads with her bare hands, while she screamed and shoot and pulled every single bastard out of her way or reduced them into a lifeless sack of meat.

She pay no mind to get into cover, the small and barely sane part of her consciousness remembering her that Garrus would have her back, and she kept her own killing rampage, her eyes and ears turned off and solely focusing on her red enemies, blue deadly energy coming right out of her skin, ripping and shooting and gashing every single _son of a bitch_ that dared to stand against her or her mate.

_Transforming. Evolving. Killing._

“Shepard!” Voices were calling her name, but she was too entrenched in her need for blood that she barely answered them, throwing herself at a group of armored vorcha and ripping off their heads in the process. “Shepard!” She kicked a varren that was attempting to go for her legs and punched a hole right between its eyes with her closed fist, thick blood and brains sticking on her knuckles. “ _Jane!_ ”

Her head turned to the voice, teeth clenching, but the sight in front of her cut right through her boiled raging adrenaline, and her heart missed a beat.

Miranda was nowhere to be seen and the body of a dark-skinned human in black Cerberus robes was sprawled close to a destroyed cargo truck, resting over a pool of red blood. But in the middle of the _carnage_ and _ruin_ she left behind, there was Garrus running desperately in her direction, his rifle long forgotten and his face enraged in a way that she never had seen in him.

She wondered for a moment, frozen in her place, why was Garrus screaming in rage and fury, and in the next second she realized why. The clenching and overwhelming pain tensed all her muscles as the large shadow of a krogan loomed over her own, and a deep gasp abandoned her throat, that was now filling with thick blood. Her back was arched and she felt how her feet were slowly abandoning the floor.

Her hands and eyes flew to her stomach, now noticing the glowing orange of a huge omni-blade coming out of her body, the red blood of her own insides adorning and staining the pointed edge.

“And here’s who I was looking for.” Garm snarled behind her with a sharp movement of his massive wrist, sinking the blade further on her stomach, but the pain was so much that she couldn’t find her voice to reply, or scream, or even breathe.

She couldn’t even find the rage that was just a few moments ago within her, when Garrus threw himself at the krogan in the most reckless attempt to get to him, and he easily took hold of him, his free massive hand holding him by the throat.

Garm threw her now limp body to the floor, chuckling in amusing satisfaction at the prize in his hand, choking and gasping for breath, wriggling uselessly in his grasp. “If I knew that this were supposed to be this easy, I would have come sooner to your lair, Archangel.” He mocked, his grave voice filled with pleasure.

And she tried to stretch an arm to Garrus, even to say something at him, something to calm him, to assure him, to remember him that the nightmare was about to be over in the next seconds, but her spine was destroyed and her blood was dripping all over her, and she never could find the strength to even raise her head and look at him one last time.

Her fingertips twitched with the remaining of her biotics and her energy, her ears filling with his shattering tones of despair, and the only thing she could do was to open her eyes wide when she heard a snap and a crack and, suddenly, he wasn’t screaming anymore.

With one of her cheeks resting on the cold bloodied floor, the last thing she could saw is how the body of the man she loved was sprawled, limp, next to her, not even a single muscle moving inside his armor. And she used the remaining of her strength to place one of her hands over his palm before closing her eyes.

_Together, to the end and beyond_ , she repeated over and over inside her head, while waiting for the final moment for the dark and the void to come and embrace her one more time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, as I said before, this chapter took me a damn long time to be written (exactly four days). I wrote the first part while having a huge migraine, and then another part was written in a drunken state (yes, that’s true, I just woke up with a mild hangover and found out that I had wrote an entire page before passing out, a HUGE LOL to that, hahaha), so probably this is going to have a couple of inconsistencies. But anyway, I think this turned out well, at least in my standards. 
> 
> Feel free to ask any questions you have, I don’t bite! And thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your amazing support <3


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